Power was lost for approximately 55 milliseconds, however, all of our gear was powered down. We have redundant UPS systems, however, we are now aware that they are wired in parallel and therefore vulnerable to power surges originating within our datacenter (we must concede that we had not anticipated this type of failure).

The majority of our systems were up within minutes of the power failure, though others took significantly longer to complete file system integrity checks.

New circuits are being deployed to our racks to ensure that we are on fully independent UPS systems wherever possible. Our provider will be adding additional independent UPS systems to connect to the racks shortly.

We may require some maintenance windows over the coming weeks to a very small subset of our customer base – all maintenance notifications will be sent with 48 hours’ notice per our policy.

Often when an outage of this magnitude occurs we find flaws in other systems and procedures: our primary sites were unavailable over the course of the outage as our failover sites had not been implemented, however, our Twitter stream remained active and in use to supply status updates.

We strive to learn from our mistakes and improve our platform – we will take this incident’s lessons and ensure that our Seattle power infrastructure is no longer vulnerable to neighboring networks’ activities.

We are approaching a holiday weekend with reduced staffing, however, if you have any questions, comments, or concerns regarding this incident (or if you would like to claim a Service Level Agreement credit) please let us know – we look forward to hearing from you and we will make every effort to address your concerns in a timely fashion.

We welcome discussion on the Spry Forums and, if you are not already subscribed, please take this opportunity to subscribe to the Spry Hosting Twitter Feed.

AJAXTerm

The AJAXTerm application provides a web-based interface to SSH and, all in all, we believe it will be a welcome alternative to the Java applet at the My.Spry.com Control Center.

You are welcome to continue using the legacy Java applet if you prefer it, however, we will be transitioning web-based console support to the new interface once AJAXTerm moves from its beta status.

We’ve been working around the clock to get everything polished up and ready for you to use and the next time you log in you’ll be sure to notice that My.Spry.com has some new controls – and a new look – to make managing your domains, shared hosting, and dedicated or virtual private server more convenient.

Among some of the new features:

• VPS Power Controls – Start, stop, and reboot
• VPS Password Management – Easily change your password
• Web SSH Applet – Securely access your VPS from your browser
• Advanced Bandwidth Reporting – Track bandwidth usage by package or IP

Ready to check it out? Log in at https://my.spry.com/ and take a look at the My.Spry.com Documentation to get the most out of your service at Spry!

Our Starter, Intermediate, Advanced, and eCommerce hosting plans have a wide range of capabilities – there’s a plan for your next project, whether you are just starting out or looking to upgrade from your present cPanel hosting:

1 E-mail Account

1 Hosted Domain

Disk:

1000 MB

Bandwidth:

5000 MB

Cost:

$25 / year

Made for parking a domain or serving a small site, the Starter plan offers everything you need to grow an idea into a successful website with the convenience of the cPanel hosting control panel.

Full Description >>

Unlimited

Unlimited

1 MySQL DB

Disk:

5000 MB

Bandwidth:

5 GB

Cost:

$3.95 / mo

Starting up a blog, wiki, or forum? This plan was made to suit the needs of your dynamic, database-driven site on the proven Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP framework and we’ve made it ultimately affordable.

Full Description >>

Unlimited

Unlimited

Unlimited

Disk:

10 GB

Bandwidth:

100 GB

Cost:

$5.95 / mo

Looking for a solution to host multiple projects?

Get unlimited domain hosting, unlimited MySQL databases, unlimited e-mail accounts, and a dedicated IP address with 10 GB of space to host everything (with room to spare!)

Full Description >>

Unlimited

Unlimited

Unlimited

Disk:

50 GB

Bandwidth:

500 GB

Cost:

$14.95 / mo

You know that customers demand the security of SSL-secured shopping and you’ll need as much space as you can get to grow your business.

Get the right tool for the job with our SSL-ready eCommerce shared hosting plan.

Full Description >>

Visit our Shared Hosting page to find out more about the innovations in hosting (and pricing) arriving at Spry.

Why the change?

Spry’s focus has always centered on providing top-quality shared web hosting and reseller VPS hosting with strong support. All of our hosting offerings – including our cPanel shared hosting, cPanel VPS hosting, and Plesk VPS hosting plans – cater to the needs of individuals and businesses who need website hosting (as conveniently, securely, and quickly as possible).

We’ve found that Webmin VPS users were right at home with Spry hosting, though they rarely needed the added benefit of a 24/7 support department and were often quite comfortable installing, upgrading, and tweaking Webmin on their own. Webmin’s flexibility allowed it to be used for a variety of applications aside from web hosting (which, in turn, inspired us to offer some new hosting options for advanced Linux users).

Enter VPSLink – the new addition to Spry’s brand – with unmanaged VPS hosting that fits the bill for Webmin installations with an even greater variety of popular Linux operating systems.

Over the last two years we have watched interest in the Webmin VPS at Spry shift towards the VPSLink service, and we would like to take this opportunity to give Webmin users the fully-configurable virtual private servers they’ve been looking for at VPSLink while re-dedicating the Spry brand to website hosting and web hosting reseller VPS solutions and the support you’ve come to expect from our diligent support team of technicians.

Gaston will be remembered by history as the man who set the world’s first land speed record: on December 18th, 1898, he reached the speed of 39.24 miles per hour in his electric Jeantaud Duc.

The present land speed record stands at a scorching, sound-barrier-breaking 766 miles per hour over a one mile stretch – about twenty times the original record.

While Gaston’s record has been surpassed many times over, we felt that he deserved a mention while we’re doing some record setting of our own.

We would like to announce a new virtual private server hosting plan which doubles the impressive allocation our Link-6 plan offers:

The Link-7

• Disk space: 160 GB
• Bandwidth: 5000 GB
• Dedicated RAM: 4096 MB

Yes, that’s five terabytes of bandwidth and four gigabytes of RAM – we’re keeping a standard unit of measurement because the Link-1 would feel a bit left out if we started representing its allocation in decimals.

Every new Link-7 OpenVZ or Xen VPS will be provisioned instantly to quality Dell hardware in our fortified datacenter, backed by our 24/7 network uptime support, and ready to roll-out with your choice from our selection of thirty-three Linux operating system templates.

Have a record in mind? Now is the time to break it. The Link-7 is here to help.

Visit LinuxFest Northwest’s
Official Site >>

Do you live in the Pacific Northwest?
Do you love Linux?
Join us at LinuxFest Northwest 2008!

You will be in good company if you can make it to this formidable gathering: there will be a wide variety of presentations geared toward developers and Linux enthusiasts, and it’s likely that there will be about one thousand attendees, including Lyle (our Support Manager and resident Linux wizard) and myself.

We will be manning the Spry/VPSLink booth, distributing all manner of free stuff, and waiting to meet and greet any Spry/VPSLink customers who can stop in for the event.

If you needed any more convincing to make the trip, check out some accounts of others’ LinuxFest experiences.

We hope to see you there!

We are pleased to announce a 10% lifetime discount coupon for new orders at VPSLink.

Want in on this deal? Pick a plan and enter VPS0308 when prompted for a coupon code to get started (this offer is good for OpenVZ or Xen VPS hosting, any plan, any billing cycle).

If you have been considering the VPSLink (or if you’ve been thinking about starting up a new project on our unmanaged VPS hosting), this is a great time to sign up and enjoy the great prices and variety of options available at VPSLink:

• Full Root Access – Install what you want, when you want it
• Server Control Center – Manage every aspect of your VPS with instant provisioning and no hassle
• Operating System Choices – Choose from more than thirty operating system template across eight flavors of Linux
• Web Hosting Reseller Control Panels – Licensing for WHM / cPanel, DirectAdmin, and ServerCP+ is available (or check out HostInABox / LXAdmin – a free alternative)

We have plans for both Spry and VPSLink which will be coming to fruition in the near future… Subscribe to this blog and check back often – you’ll be glad that you did.