Dear Customers,
As you must be already aware of by now, we suffered a power outage early morning on Sunday. The hardware node on which your virtual machine exists is one of the affected servers. Owing to the sudden loss of power (as it happens in such outages), high configuration servers invariably suffer a filesystem disruption. The entire file & directory structure is disturbed creating huge bad sectors of data on the hard-disks of the server. The only way to repair this is to run a fsck (filesystem check) to rectify the filesytem errors and problems. This process takes anything between a few hours to a few days to complete depending upon the percentage of bad sectors and the amount of data stored within those sectors which have gone bad. In this particular case, there were quite a few of them which is why the FSCK took all this long.
However, in the process of repairing the bad sectors on the hard-disks, a vast chunk of data has been lost irrecoverably. This happened due to the repair measures which the FSCK procedure took. There was little we could do to help avoid this as without a full FSCK, the node could not have been brought back to working conditions. To add to these, the backups which we had for the node also got wiped out in the repair process. The backup drive had major bad sectors and took the longest to be finished. So not only was the current data lost, but even the backup which he had dated to 28th June and a few copies before it have been lost completely (the backup of this server was also running at precisely the same time when the problems began with the power outage). Had this not happened, it would have been very easy for us to restore the data for all individual
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At this time, we have a copy of the data which was backed up on 30/05/2008 i.e. one month old. This is the only copy we have left for the hardware node which we have available for use. Realizing the inconvenience, hardships and anguish that this would be causing you, Eukhost.com will be giving two months hosting free of cost as compensation for this incident. The changes have already been done to your billing accounts with us.
We realise that this is not a good situation. Eukhost.com understands its responsibility towards customers fully. We are aware of the fact that your online presence is established and subsists from the service we provide because of which it only becomes even more necessary for us to ensure that service is uninterrupted and continuous at all times. A full scale investigation is still on as to why the UPS of the particular section failed. Our vendor had given assurances that there is no possibility of a UPS failure in that particular section of the datacenter as it was only replaced sometime back. We have put in considerable efforts to ensure that we have the best of back-up systems on all fronts viz - NOC, power systems, hardware and data. We have now moved almost all our
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dedicated servers nodes along with the shared servers to a new facility which has a "2N+1 UPS system" cover to guard against such possible mishaps. The remaining nodes will soon be moved too. We said this the last time as well; I would like to state once again that Eukhost.com will definitely take all possible measures to ensure that such unforeseen problems are avoided altogether.
We look forward to carry forward our existing relationship with you. I, in my personal capacity, would like to reassure you about our services and that such an incident won’t be allowed to happen ever again. Eukhost.com is extremely grateful for the immense patience, invaluable understanding and patience displayed by you. It only pushes us ahead to strive hard to achieve maximum possible customer satisfaction. Thank you once again.