Outage Aims Spotlight at Web Host Rackspace

Posted by Webhost - 30/06/09 at 09:06 pm

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).”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 at 9:19 pm and is filed under Web Hosts. The entry is tagged under You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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