I have a number of clients who have equipment colocated all over the country, these sites range from individual and corporate blogs, e-commerce websites and even a customer that does 50 million in product revenue from house hold items. On the surface it may not seem like these sites have anything in common, except that all demand that they websites are always availible.

As a technology consultant I have to plan for the unlikely or the unreasonable while balancing this against the possible and probable. A consultant needs to balance what is likely to happen but plan for the unlikely. Here is a perfect example from this weekend.

There is a HUGE colocation provider located in Texas called The Planet that has near 100% historical uptime. They are located in a part of the country that is not prone to flooding, fire, tornadoes, hurricanes or even earthquakes – they seem like an excellent choice for a safe, reliable and cost effective service provider. They have all of the industry standard redundancies for Internet, environmental controls and security. They also stated that they had best of breed power systems, well this weekend – this failed.

Their data center literally had an explosion! According to The Planet website a piece of electrical gear shorted out and created an explosion that knocked down three walls of their electrical equipment room.

No injuries were reported and no servers were damaged or lost. But about 9000 servers were powered down and inaccessible from Internet. This means that tens of thousands of businesses were affected.

With a down server you could be offline for hours or even days. I still trust the planet Sometimes bad things just happen I bet that more than 99% of you have no idea when your website goes down.

Here is a quick tip: I monitor all of my clients critical servers with an online service called Pingdom, there a a few of these services out there but this seems to be the most reliable that I have found. On Saturday I received about 60 SMS messages to my Blackberry – I got in touch with technical support and then notified the affected clients. From my standpoint, it is better to be informed proactively than reactively.

The lesson here is, make sure that you or a member of your team gets proactively notified every time there is an issue with your website AND your mail server!

• Make sure this goes to email and to SMS
• Have the contact information about the service provider
• Have your contract or account number
• Your IT company and Staff should not be the only people getting these alerts
• Do you have current online backups of your critical business data.

If you have suggestions for other monitoring systems, colocation providers or ways that smaller businesses can handle these situations let me know.