An electrical fire broke out today at the Great Westerford building in Cape Town that houses the Hetzner data centre. The Cape Town Fire Department had the fire under control and extinguished by late morning. Service was not affected and continued to run as normal.
The fire broke out on the third floor of the building and did not directly affect the Hetzner Data Centre, which is located in the basement. However, power was cut to the building and the data centre had to revert to backup power. Service was not affected during the event, but these were obviously some anxious times.
No word yet on the exact cause of the fire or remedial measures that may be needed.
Hats of to the Fire Department for quick action and to Hetzner for good contingency planning!
So you may wonder what if… What if the unthinkable happened and we would lost servers at any of our locations due to fire? It will obviously be a terrible thing, but we should be able to recover within a few days:
- We make full server backups off-site once a week. Our client’s data is thus safe. We can thus restore all websites to their state less than a week ago.
- It will take a day or so to get new hardware in place in a new location.
- It will take another day or two to configure such new servers and restore from backup.