In case you were trying to access any of the Thoughts Media sites (Pocket PC Thoughts, Digital Media Thoughts, Zune Thoughts, Smartphone Thoughts) or Mobility Site this weekend, you most likely noticed that you couldn’t. Evidently there was an explosion at The Planet’s Houston data center. According to a letter sent to The Planet’s customers, “three walls of the electrical equipment room on the first floor blew several feet from their original position, and the underground cabling that powers the first floor of H1 was destroyed.” But that’s not all.

Read the letter* I’ve posted below, and tell me if the idea of this type of catastrophe doesn’t totally freak you out. Of course there are a lot of smaller hosting companies who resell Planet server space; I think this may turn out to be an even larger problem than initially thought. :-/

I hope that the 9000 servers affected are soon up again, and I hope a bare minimum of data (if any) was lost; what a mess.

Dear Valued Customers:

As previously committed, I would like to provide an update on where we stand following yesterday’s explosion in our H1 data center. First, I would like to extend my sincere thanks for your patience during the past 28 hours.  We are acutely aware that uptime is critical to your business, and you have my personal commitment that The Planet team will continue to work around the clock to restore your service.

As you have read, we have begun receiving some of the equipment required to start repairs.  While no customer servers have been damaged or lost, we have new information that damage to our H1 data center is worse than initially expected. Three walls of the electrical equipment room on the first floor blew several feet from their original position, and the underground cabling that powers the first floor of H1 was destroyed.

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Jason Dunn has relaunched Digital Home Thoughts with a new look and a contest.

He has about $6500USD worth of goodies to give away. You better hurry, the contest ends tomorrow!!

Update from Jason:

I should have added that while all the individual contests will still say April 7th is the deadline (there are too many for me to change by hand), the real deadline is Friday morning, the 11th:

http://www.digitalhomethoughts.com/news/show/88477

Via: Digital Home Thoughts