As some may have noticed, email and access to this website would have not been working last Wednesday morning. This was due to a network hardware problem that occurred in my hosts ACT data-centre (see http://status.aussiehq.com.au/item/2025.html for the explanation). 

Now with most hosts, this and other networking issues occurs only once in a while (some hosts though are worse (see the Whirlpool Forums for posts on these) and some are unlikely (Dreamhost has had unfortunate issues in the past)).

Now the biggest thing, and something that I guess isn’t thought of, is what happens if there is an explosion and fire in the power room of a data-centre.

Usually if there is a power issue (eg. no power to the grid), backup generators kick in. Unfortunately, for ‘The Planet’, they had a short that caused their power room in one of their data-centre’s to catch fire and explode (thankfully for them, not causing any damage to other infrastructure including servers). At least they are keeping updates on their forums about the issue, something that some other hosts rarely do.