Err.. sorry bout that…

It appears that Dreamhost uses servers and internet connections that require electricity.. so, after the (probably now unemployed) Power Company worker shut off half of Los Angeles, Dreamhost no longer had a connection to the internet (and from this post on their blog, they had their own little catastrophe to deal with to).

From the Dreamhost blog:

When the power went out for the city, the UPSes came on, and things were fine (that’s when Nate made that last post about us being okay). However, as they started to run out the generators had to kick in. It turned out, and this is the boo-boo, the generators could NOT generate enough power for all the data centers after all! And so, rather than just doing some sort of lower-level of power output, they are apparently configured to all just shut themselves off when things are overloaded.

Of course, there are lots of people yelling at the DH guys for not keeping everything running during the outage..but.. DH also mentions that all 3 of their network providers were knocked out to..so it wouldn’t have mattered if DH’s building had been able to keep the power on or not (well..I guess it would have minimized the downtime).

Personally? I think they handled it pretty good..little room for improvement.. but, since its probably better then what I could have done had I been running my own server (ignoring the fact that I don’t live in LA, so the blackout didn’t affect me)..I don’t have any complaints…