Yesterday there was a brief period (about 20 minutes) of downtime for our web servers in Atlanta.  Seems there was a power outage downtown that, according to the server facility spokesman, is being attributed to the recent heat wave.  The outage not only knocked out power to the facility, but also fried the activator that should have turned on their backup generators.  As a result, you may have experienced a few minutes where your website was down.

First of all, we apologize.  We know that your website is important to you, and it’s equally important to us.  We hate it when this kind of thing happens, and work very hard to keep instances like this from occurring. 

We are very pleased, therefore, to announce to you that we are moving our servers to a local facility in Nashville.  Dolphini Networks, located on 10th Avenue South in downtown Nashville, is housed in a $27 million Lucent facility.  From the Dolphini website:

“Dolphini has a 20,000 square foot data center and over 10,000 square foot of office space which is completely surrounded by its own firewall, fire prevention and security systems, making it completely autonomous from the rest of the building.”

We have met with these folks on a couple occasions, and have personally toured the facility.  We feel that this is a much better overall solution for our web hosting needs, and that outages will be significantly more rare.  More imporantly, perhaps, is that this new facility is close enough that our networking personnel, led by Mike Miller, can be in the building with their hands on the actual server within minutes of any problem that might arise. 

Our top priority has been to find the right solution, not just the first solution we stumbled across, and we are confident that Dolphini is the answer we’ve been searching for.  We will be installing the new servers in the next couple weeks, and there won’t be any downtime related to the switch.  We look forward to continuing to offer you the best service possible.