Mrs. Mecomber’s Scrapbook

News is not trickling in very quickly. I got an email from the folks at Entrecards, informing me that their website is down due to a fire at ThePlanet Database Center. The datacenter is located in Houston, Texas. Apparently, an electrical transformer exploded, burning down three walls. The electrical power has been turned off, and all websites hosted by ThePlanet were down all night Saturday.

My initial reaction was that of shock. I suppose I viewed a datacenter as something non-tangible and amorphous, something akin to vegan shoes or something. Oh, so– websites aren’t created out of thin air! They are on computers and those computers sometimes fail! Haha! It wasn’t until I got my own websites that I finally began to understand that the Internet is not like radio– it’s not really transported via waves, but via tangible databases.

OK, anyway… so that’s why a lot of websites are down. Entrecards says the site may be up in 12-24 hours. Statcounter.com is up although there are some components of the site not working. And the only news story I could find, and Newsblaze.com, is down because– duh– they are hosted by ThePlanet, too.