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(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Early Tuesday morning, Rackspace Cloud (www.rackspacecloud.com) engineers saw intermittent connectivity problems with the WC2 cluster at the web hosting provider's Dallas-Fort Worth data center due to intermittent power connectivity following uninterruptible power supply maintenance.
The majority of service had been restored to the WC2 cluster within an hour after Rackspace first noticed the issue at 12:35am CST, however, some sites still had performance issues, mainly dealing with SSL clusters. After two hours, Rackspace reported that all services and clusters were online and responding for Cloud Sites in WC2, but there were still a few residual DNS and FTP cluster pool issues in WC2, which were dealt with by 4:30am, restoring service to normal.
SSL issues resurfaced at about 6am and were promptly dealt with by Rackspace Cloud engineers. At 9am, Rackspace noticed slow performance on sites using the PHP 5-3 Cluster, which were also quickly corrected.
"Rackspace has experienced a service interruption during tonight's scheduled maintenance on UPS Cluster G," stated Debbie Talley in a company blog post. "We were testing phase rotation on a Power Distribution Unit when a short occurred and caused us to lose the PDUs behind this cluster. The phase rotation allows us to verify synchronization of power between primary and secondary sources."
The power distribution units were only offline for a total of five minutes, and their maintenance was rescheduled to deal with the more pressing matter of the intermittent Cloud Sites downtime.
Just one of its nine worldwide facilities, Rackspace's Dallas-Fort Worth data center was hit by two notable outages over the summer. In August, part of the Dallas-Fort Worth data center went offline for approximately 45 minutes. A week later, a bus duct failure caused customers to lose network access for a short period of time.
Rackspace guarantees 100 percent network and infrastructure uptime in its service level agreement. In terms of compensation, the SLA is fairly straightforward: "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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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.
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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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Comment by Anonymous on Wednesday, November 04, 2009
David,
We let our customers down on Tuesday morning, and for that we are very sorry. We are working hard to gain everyone’s trust back. Please reach out if you or any of your readers would like to talk or have questions.
Emil Sayegh (emil.sayegh@rackspace.com) General Manager, The Rackspace Cloud