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(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- A report posted on TechCrunch yesterday evening identifying an outage at hosting company Rackspace (www.rackspace.com), also illustrated the unusual kind of interest an outage at a company with the profile of Rackspace can create these days.
The outage itself lasted approximately 45 minutes, and affected part of the company’s Dallas data center, one of nine facilities operated worldwide by the company. According to reports from Rackspace, the outage was the result of “power interruptions were the result of a range of power infrastructure issues.”
Rackspace issued updates over twitter while it’s own site was down, and posted a blog entry at 11:26 p.m. central time, promising more details following further investigation – possibly today.
“We don’t have a lot of details on exactly what happened yet,” says the post, by Brian Urioste, the company’s senior online marketing manager. “When we have an outage, our first focus is on fixing it and getting customers online as soon as possible. Now that we have the near-term situation stabilized in Dallas, we have some work to do to improve our reliability. We will follow up with more information as we work through our root-cause analysis.”
Interestingly, the company’s considerable presence on Twitter, and as a favored provider among tech pundits, bloggers and more traditional celebrities, meant the outage – which, at a smaller company, might have flown under the radar of Internet users in general – was a hotly discussed topic for at least a short time.
The TechCrunch post includes screenshots of a long list of Twitter posts from well-known users, including pop singer Justin Timberlake – not necessarily a source you’d expect to hear from on a web hosting outage.
Rackspace guarantees 100 percent network and infrastructure uptime, but its service level agreement is fairly straightforward about the terms for compensation: “Rackspace will credit your account 5% of the monthly fee for each 30 minutes of infrastructure downtime, up to 100% of your monthly fee for the affected server(s).”
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October 2009 - Web Hosting's All Star Team
This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
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July 2009 - What am I Worth?
One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
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May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
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