February 22, 2008 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Web hosting provider Globat (globat.com) says it has fully recovered from yesterday morning's outage, which caused almost all customer sites, as well as Globat's own site, its service infrastructure and phone systems to go offline throughout the entire day. As reported yesterday, the major outage left hundreds of upset customers without answers as the service provider was unable to be reached by phone.
In his blog (benneumann.com) posting late last night, Globat CEO Ben R. Neumann offered a full explaination for the network outage. The primary switch in Globat's main data center in downtown Los Angeles failed completely at approximately 5:00 a.m. PST yesterday, says Neumann. Globat's technical emergency response team tried to bring the network back online but could not.
The company then switched over to the back up circuitry, at which time the entire devise, including the backup system, failed completely. Globat rush ordered a new switch from its vendor's nearest warehouse, and after installing and testing the equipment, it was able to successfully bring all of its services back online. However, it experienced another five hour outage for email services and an eight hour outage for Web related services, which affected its own website and its phone lines.
Since it was unable to communicate with customers through telephone or email, Globat staff members posted updates on popular Internet forums to update customers on any new information.
Neumann apologized to customers for the outage in his blog: I would like to tell you that we ABSOLUTELY KNOW you count on Globat.com to maintain a high degree of uptime to host your Web sites and that we take this trust very seriously. Today, however, my team and I let you down and we all feel terrible because of that. This has never happened before and we will do whatever it takes to never let it happen again! I deeply and sincerely apologize for this outage and the inconvenience and problems it may have caused.
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Comment by Anonymous on Friday, February 22, 2008
You'd think a company devoted to webhosting would have a backup website at another datacenter they could switch to quickly to notify their customers... if nothing else. We're a small webhosting company with similar pricing, and we maintain a (rented) dedicated server and a (rented) VPS at geographically diverse locations, so neither our DNS nor an emergency website will be offline.