ThePlanet.com’s H1 Datacenter in Texas experienced a fire and explosion caused by an electrical short on Saturday at approximately 5:45pm. An Initial report by the Datacenter staff suggests that no damage has been caused directly by the fire or explosion but there is the possibility of damage being caused to some customers by the power outage itself causing instability in data stored on customers servers.

According to Amy R. who works for ThePlanet an estimated 9,000 customers are affected currently and perhaps over 700,000 websites if not more are currently down as a result of this incident. Instead of going directly to backup power for some reason the Datacenter’s automated switchover did not initiate during the fire and explosion and when the local fire officials arrived they instructed ThePlanet H1 staff not to manually switch to backup power.

ThePlanet has informed it’s customers that it will be issuing credits automatically and this outage is estimated currently to cost ThePlanet upwards of $891,000 just to restore customers and by issuing credits. In addition ThePlanet will be forced to repair infrastructure and pay overtime for it’s staff which would also result in hundreds of thousands dollars being spent.

But ThePlanet’s customers are likely to see damages with a much higher price tag due to downtime of their individual sites and their inability to sell products and services during this outage. Some customers without any doubt make thousands of dollars a month via websites and various web services hosted on servers located at ThePlanet’s H1 facility and this outage will cause a large impact on those profits.

One concern ThePlanet will have to deal with is the loss of customers moving their data, websites and services to other providers. This kind of an accident is very rare and unlikely in the industry since some many standards are in place to prevent this kind of an occurrence and as a result it will effect the integrity of ThePlanet’s services some customers will end their relationship with ThePlanet and even parties who were considering starting a business relationship with ThePlanet will be cautious due to this incident. ThePlanet has greatly effected it’s own ability to continue to claim some of it’s hosting capabilities on it’s company website.


Customers have been directed to visit a status update thread located here due to limited availability of ThePlanet support staff.