Yow. I wondered why Entrecards and Statcounter were down for so long yesterday. There was a fire at the database center in Houston, Texas! got this in my email this morning:

Greetings,

Unfortunately, there has been an electrical fire at the data center housing Entrecard’s servers. The servers have not been damaged, but the site may be down for as long as 12 hours.

Entrecard is hosted with ThePlanet, and this fire has effected over 9000 websites, as many of the world’s most popualar websites are hosted with ThePlanet. They are working around the clock to get their data center back online, and we are hoping that they get it back online fast.

Thank you for your pateince and understanding with this rare and frustrating problem. Unfortunately, there is absolutely nothing we can do but wait for The Planet to get their datacenter back online.

Please check back with Entrecard in 12 to 24 hours.

Thanks,

Entrecard Team

I did a search for news, and all I found was this at WordPlop:

The phone number on The Planet’s website leads to an auto recording stating that a transformer caught fire. The fire department has told them to shut down all power, including all generators and backup power. The Planet says no networking gear was harmed, so it sounds like all the servers should be fine unless the smoke got to them.

There is no ETA on when the entire datacenter, which is located in Houston, Texas, will be back up.

UPDATE: The Planet has confirmed that no servers were damaged. The cause of the fire appears to be an explosion that was caused by a short in some electrical equipment. The explosion took out 3 walls in the building. The Planet says some servers will be back up by tomorrow afternoon.

So that’s why your traffic stats are so low, if you’re wondering. LOL.

There’s a news story about it; I found it while searching news. All I can see is this:

The Planet Houston Data Center Goes Up in a Puff of Smoke
NewsBlaze, CA - 7 hours ago
By Alan Gray, NewsBlaze Tonight at 5:45 pm in Houston, Texas, a transformer in The Planet H1 datacenter caught fire. The fire department required them to …

When I click the link, guess what– the website is hosted by The Planet, so it’s unavailable. Statcounter is back up, for the most part, so they are making good progress on getting the sites back up, I think.

My sympathies to all bloggers who have their blogs hosted there. I hope things are up and running for you very soon!

So I can’t drop Entrecards. :( I didn’t know how addicted I was until this, lol! Well, there’s always the exciting world of shopping for a new cell phone repeater or something. :S