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06/02/2008: "Sites Up and Down?"
Over the past 24+ hours most of you have been unable to access our servers. Long story which you can read about here ( http://service-update.theplanet.com/ ) should you want the technical reason for it. Our sites are not down often, and this problem was almost unavoidable as you'll read about in the above site post. This outage impacted 7500 servers directly so they say, 9000 different companies, 90,000 websites someone estimated, but these amazingly high numbers are actually lower than the truth as our sites were effected, but our server technically did NOT go down! I could access it, and as I checked our logs seems that some others figured a back way in as well, but the Domain Name Servers which were suppose to point you towards our site were down because of that explosion as described in the site post above. So, while our server remained up, few people were able to access it as the server which had the domain information was down and thus you weren't getting pointed to our server.
They are getting things resolved with this so things will be up and down and quickly improving. I'm made some changes to add redundancy with the name servers, but it's also possible that this will cause some temporary problems as those changes take effect as well as I went ahead and made some other changes that needed to be made since things were basically down for you all anyway.
The short of this is that things will just get better, but there may be some ups and downs over the next day or few days as things get worked out. You can rest assured though that we have the best servers available as we really went serious overkill as usual when we last updated our servers with each having 2 Intel Xeon Quad Core chips for a total of 8 cores of processing power per machine when 1 core should have been enough--so that's not the problem and should never be the problem, but all that power doesn't mean shit if people can't access the server I guess!
I'll keep you posted.