Lowest Hosting positive review #2572 by Tim Reid (aegcomputers@h...)


Lowest Hosting got a positive review on
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Lowest Hosting
12518 NE Airport Way
Portland , OR 97230
US
☎ Phone 800-762-4913
Customer review #2572
3.5/10
Tim Reid ( aegcomputers@h... )
Time Hosted over 3 years
Global rating
I received this e-mail in response to my query this morning:
Dear Tim,

ETA for servers is between 5-9PM.
We apologize for the delay in reply. Most clients have been calling and this email is normally only used as an off network emergency access to our domain for updating dns.

There was a major power outage in one of the data centers where we maintain many of our servers in this case the H1 data center in houston. Although we own our servers and have our own datacenter staff we lease access in the datacenter to supply our access poin to the internet backbones (level 3, savis etc) and to provide us with power for our server racks.

The Datacenter has N+1 redundancy and does have UPS battery backup and Backup generator capability but a completely unusual occurance happened where the main Stepdown power transformer shorted resulting in an explostion and small fire in the electrical interface room. Normally when Power goes out the network swiching swiches over to the UPS which is a short term 2 hour battery system while the backup generators go online and are cut into the master power buss.

The problem was that the explosion destroyed the Power panels where the generators connect to the main power busses. This outage effected not only Lowesthostings servers but 40 other major hosts and over 9000 servers so it was a major unexpected outage.

The good news is the new Transformer has finally been aquired and is being installed and we are told it will be tested over the next few hours and various switches & routers brought back online and tested before power is sequenced to our server bank so it should not be more than this evening after that your server comes back online.

Once power is back, your server and all data will come online as before. Anyones mail server that has attempted to send you emails during the outage window will automatically attempt redelivery so you may get a few 36 hour old emails but none will be lost.

Our main Lowesthosting.com website does have an emergency backup server in our other Datacenter but it takes 24 hours for that to propagate so our main customer portal has been down which has frustrated our staff and many cleints for our inability to post news or reply to tickets during the propagation to our emergency server.

We apologize for this window where you were unable to reach us and although we have never had a catastrophic outage in 8 years and pride ourselves on average a 99.84% cleint server uptime we will be installing a new high availability cluster on our main website so should we ever have a major outage our website and news and ticketing system would not go down for even a minute.

We realize the problem is not that the server is down so much as people not being able to reach our website but that is purely due to the dns propgation delay for the cut over to our emergency backup server. To make matters worse many people did not write down our phone number and did not know how to reach us.

For future reference our main number is 800-762-4913 and our billing number is 503-579-7973

You should know that we not only backup all of your data in our data center but maintain an emergency archival copy off network so we really do maintain the integrity of your data.

Again we apologize for any inconvenience. Its been a long difficult weekend for our staff as well and we will be posting a full story and pictures on our website shortly. The servers will be back up in a few hours.

Regards,

Ray Alin
Assistant Manager
Lowesthosting.com

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