Shared hosting provider Globat said a switch failure knocked all of its survices offline for eight hours Thursday, and left the company without phone service as well. Globat CEO Ben Neumann said the outage was the longest in the company's history.
"Our primary network switch in our main datacenter in downtown Los Angeles failed completely," Neumann wrote, adding that the switch was from a brand name vendor and the "only piece of equipment at Globat.com that could possibly be a single point of failure." Neumann writes:
We will now keep a second switch, with its own built-in redundancy, in our data center to prevent a prolonged outage in the unlikely event of another switch failure. In addition, we are working with our phone vendor to create an automated failover system so calls will be routed directly to remote support sites in the case of a failure of our primary phone system.
Globat, which is based in Los Angeles, was founded in 2001. Last year the company made three acquisitions, buying Hostaway, Newista and CompleteHostingSolutions.com.
