A hosting server fail that made us quite proud

As a web hosting company, we usually take pride in our ability to keep our servers up. But an uncharacteristic server fail was a strange source of pride for us last week...

Posted on 06 May 2015 - Hosting
Tibus BY Tibus

Most hosting companies would probably want to keep any server fails they suffer as quiet as possible. Instead, we want to share this one with you because, truth be told, we're quite proud of it.

On Friday afternoon, one of our hosting servers failed. To be more accurate, its disk had failed. There was no major problem because we had recovered everything to a fresh server within half-an-hour.

With the recovery process complete, we could start to reflect on the server failure... and we soon realised we couldn't really hold a grudge against the offending piece of hardware.

Before its disk failure, the server had been working hard for us for an incredible 2,629 days in a row. That is more than 7 years of continuous, diligent service. An amazing effort.

The disk turned at 15,000 revolutions per minute throughout those 7 years. At a disk revolution of 30cm, we worked out that the disk had travelled a total of 17,035,920km across its lifespan.

So, we decided that a server disk that had clocked up more than 17 million kilometres in revolutions and had served us so well for so long was probably entitled to a rest.

Facts about our failed hosting server

  • Travelled far enough in desk revolutions to go to the moon and back 44 times.
  • Could have made 573 return trips to visit its colleagues in our data centre in Perth, Australia.
  • Launched in the same year as Windows Vista.
  • Started work a couple of months after Gordon Brown became Prime Minister and before Nick Clegg was leader of the Liberal Democrats.
  • Was a contemporary of the 1st generation iPhone, which hit the shelves in 2007 and was declared "obsolete" by Apple in June 2013.

If that's the sort of service you want from your server, find out about our hosting and cloud services.