Hey all,
I wanted to personally apologize for the downtime on US West last night around 10pm PST.
There was a datacenter catastrophe with a statistical rarity of UFO carrying Godzilla hits endangered black rhino. Linode (basically the father of VPS) Fremont datacenter had a power outage and our block went out for 45 mins. Last time Fremont was out like this was maybe over 10 years ago. I don’t know how many millions of sites were out but Pingdom was down, McDonald’s was down, and countless others.
We chose the Fremont datacenter because so much of Silicon Valley is in there so it’s a great one to bet on. This is the exact same datacenter used by many high-end webhosts (WPengine as well) and large global companies. Our team was on standby to bring things up as fast as we could in case there was anything possible on our end. I just want to assure you all that we are on top of things, always picking the most reliable datacenter for not only our own business but yours as well. It’s unfortunate but these incidents happen regularly in the hosting world. Even Amazon and Facebook (with all their failover mechanisms) still go down a few times every year.
At this current moment…we are choosing to keep our US West server on Fremont datacenter because it’s never failed in the 8-9 years we’ve with them prior to this incident. Should it go down again within the next couple years, we will move to their Dallas datacenter.
For all those with kind words of support and understanding, THANK YOU! It means a lot to me. For all those who didn’t even notice we had an outage, thank you for being understand as well.
Options for those wanting absolute 100% service-level agreements:
Also…if you have absolutely mission critical stuff…there is a choice between moving you to a much more expensive 100% SLA datacenter, or a HA plan (high availability) which is paying for 2-3 servers so you always have a failover. But personally for even my own businesses…I would choose to remain here on Linode Fremont as I’ve been a tenant there for almost 10 years and many servers with virtually zero issues. Last night was definitely nightmarish for me.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask! I don’t sleep at all when any of my servers are down.
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