My former host, ThePlanet.com, is working through a major outage that had them take down 9000 servers in their data center. Apparently a transformer caught fire and the fire department came by and told the staff that they were not allowed to activate their backup generators so 9000 servers and 7500 customers are out of luck. My server at The Planet (which we still employ for storage) is actually online at the moment so not everyone was affected. Despite some bad press from time to time, I actually had a great experience with The Planet. I had a few strong servers with excellent uptime and the support was OK. I ended up using a third party security/management team, but The Planet always fulfilled their end of the bargain. An outage like this looks incredibly bad for them, but given the fire departments stance on activating the backups, it's not really The Planet's fault. The good news is that they said they will be honoring their SLA. You can follow the matter on their forums. It's nice to see how transparent they've gotten, this was not the case a few years ago (but then again few companies were). What's really bothersome about this is the despite all the redundancy pr0n and security that these hosts talk about when are you researching who to use, a single incident normally takes them out. All those huge diesel generators and retinal-scanning security doors and earthquake-proof building foundations are great, but it seems like something else manages to take these places down. I guess you can only prepare so much and we don't hear about it when the redundancy systems work and a emergency goes as planned (well, as close to as planned as possible) but it still seems like the systems are more fragile than we'd like to believe. We really need data stored across multiple data centers in different parts of the country (or world) but that leads to all sorts of problems with syncing and balancing and can get quite expensive quickly, especially if for someone who just needs a server or two.