When a major storm rolled across the Phoenix area Thursday, most of the Valley measured the damage in downed branches and flickering lights. At one data center, the toll was measured in websites.
Namecheap, one of the world's largest domain registrars and web hosts with more than 18 million domains under management, said the storm caused a cooling system failure at the RadiusDC data center in Phoenix, which hosts some of the company's essential operations.
With temperatures around the equipment climbing toward dangerous levels, the facility instructed Namecheap to take services offline to protect customer hardware from permanent damage.
What went dark
The shutdown affected Namecheap.com itself along with shared, VPS and dedicated hosting, the EasyWP WordPress platform, DNS management and Private Email, according to the company's account of the incident. More than 5,000 servers were reportedly taken offline, and full repairs took roughly 15 hours, as reported by TechRadar.
One important thing kept working: DNS resolution, the system that tells browsers where to find websites, continued to function. Customers could not manage their settings during the outage, but domains themselves kept resolving.
The failure reached beyond the Namecheap name. Spaceship, the company's sister registrar and hosting brand, said in its own incident update that the same cooling failure disrupted its shared and VPS hosting, email forwarding and Spacemail service, though Spaceship.com itself stayed online. Recovery on both brands involved temporary chillers brought in and directed at the affected halls while crews worked to restore the facility's cooling.
