The website will be offline for an unknown amount of time. I was hosting this site on a dedicated server, provided by "ThePlanet" hosting. It was located in one of their Houston data centers. Saturday afternoon, a transformer explosion and fire took down the entire data center (consisting of 9000 servers). They are working to restore power, etc, but do not have an ETA for when things will be back online - their power room was pretty badly damaged, and the Houston Fire Dept. will not allow them to turn on back-up generators, etc. Here is the official description of the problem from ThePlanet management, and below this are links where you can directly follow the status of their repair activities.

All of my normal email is down - if you need to reach me before things come back on line, use this email address: "jsilj1@peoplepc.com".

I had planned to move my hosting to another, less expensive service at the end of June ... looks like now would be a good time to get that started. You're seeing this message on a new host - not on the dedicated server that I had been using up until Sat. afternoon. Check back occasionally for additional updates. And now for some official words from "ThePlanet" ...

Dear Valued Customers:

This evening at 4:55 in our H1 data center, electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding our electrical equipment room Thankfully, no one was injured. In addition, no customer servers were damaged or lost.

We have just been allowed into the building to physically inspect the damage. Early indications are that the short was in a high-volume wire conduit. We were not allowed to activate our backup generator plan based on instructions from the fire department.

This is a significant outage, impacting approximately 9,000 servers and 7,500 customers. All members of our support team are in, and all vendors who supply us with data center equipment are on site. Our initial assessment, although early, points to being able to have some service restored by mid-afternoon on Sunday. Rest assured we are working around the clock.

We are in the process of communicating with all affected customers. we are planning to post updates every hour via our forum and in our customer portal. Our interactive voice response system is updating customers as well.

There is no impact in any of our other five data centers.

I am sorry that this accident has occurred and apologize for the impact.

Sincerely,

Douglas J. Erwin
Chairman & Chief Executive Officer

Here's a link to the discussion forum at ThePlanet, which provides periodic (approximately hourly) updates on the situation in Houston - response of this website is very slow - 1000's of people are closely monitoring it for the lastest info.