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(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- According to reports over the weekend, a power failure at Verizon (www.verizonbusiness.com/za/) in Rondebosch, a suburb of Cape Town, South Africa, left thousands of people unable to access their websites on Saturday after the hosting provider's generator failed to kick in.
Independent Online, or IOL, a local publication in South Africa, said its news site, was "hard-hit by the crash" and even popular SMS chat applications like MXit were unavailable for most of the day, leaving "thousands of teenagers unable to communicate with their friends."
According to reports, a spokesperson for Verizon told IOL that its generators failed to turn on after the back-up battery "crashed under the strain as the generators failed to switch on."
Verizon said its Telkom trunk line had also been affected and engineers were working on restoring the line.
A user that goes by the name RPM in the MyBroadband.co.za forums elaborated on the Verizon outage explaining that "[South African utility provider] Eskom power disruptions were anticipated on Saturday as the city had planned scheduled maintenance... Verizon's standby generator power was expected to carry the load as the maintenance was to affect their electricity supply. Regrettably, Verizon's generator failed, which resulted in the core network shutting down."
Despite the lack of updated information on Verizon's website, which seems to be the unofficial "norm" with how service providers keep their customers "in-the-loop" in situations such as these, IOL says most of the service seems to have been restored as of late Saturday.
Verizon's office in Cape Town provides bandwidth to around 140 companies in South Africa, including the Mount Nelson Hotel, Scania trucking, Masterfoods and wireless Internet service provider iBurst.
The WHIR reported on another outage late last week when cloud storage provider FlexiScale was hit with its second outage in two months, leaving some customers without access to their servers for more than 18 hours.
Read Back Issues of WHIR Magazine
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.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
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.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
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