Sep 15, 2008 : Web Hosts Cope with Hurricane Ike

📅 September 15, 2008 - Data center and web hosting providers in Texas, an area that is home to a plethora of tech firms, were battoning down the hatches on Friday for Hurricane Ike, the latest in a series of tropical storms to hit the US during the ever-turbulant hurricane season.


According to several reports, Ike's 100 mph winds and 16 inches of rain hit the Texas coast hard over the weekend, especially around the Galveston Bay, leaving most of the area underwater and nearby cities, like Houston, without power on Monday.

Power, or the lack of power, is a pretty big deal for a hosting provider's business. Certain companies, like The Planet (theplanet.com 👉 Total Reviews: 3
🙌 Average Rating: 1 / 10
👍 Good Reviews: 0
👎 Bad Reviews: 3
👈 Official Responses: 0 -> softlayer.com -> ibm.com), reported on Friday through its customer forum that it was certainly preparing for the worst but would be able to power its 10,000 servers in Houston, as well as its headquarters, for up to a week without any backup.

"For data center power, we have confirmed our fuel levels and have brought in an additional 10,000 gallons as backup," wrote Kevin Hazard, web hosting evangelist for The Planet. "Backup generators at both data centers and our Houston headquarters are prepared to shoulder the power needs of the data centers and our downtown offices. We pay premium fees year-round with several providers to guarantee that we are at the front of the line if we need additional fuel."

The company also shifted some staff to Dallas to be ready to provide customer support and monitor network operations throughout the storm.

According to the updates on the forum, it looks like The Planet was able to keep its data center up and powered for most of the storm.

Other companies in the Houston area, like cPanel (cpanel.net), were also affected by Hurricane Ike and kept customers notified with updates on its website.

The company wrote that its Houston office was running in "emergency mode" and that staff would be limited for the next few days.

"Our phone systems may be intermittently unavailable however we are answering emails and web based support requests," writes the company on its home page. "We have offsite operations up and running to continue to provide customer service and technical support during the storm. As always, our infrastructure is highly redundant and includes failover. We do not expect any service interruptions from this storm. We ask that you bear with us when submitting requests over the next few days as our response times may be longer than standard."

As of Monday, ABC News reported that "at least two million customers are still without power, and thousands are stranded in their homes, or in shelters, across the Gulf Coast."