SSBoards: Hostrocket Email Issue

Valued HostRocket Customer:

HostRocket truly appreciates the opportunity to host your web site. As you know, we have an amazing track record when it comes to reliability. Our uptime records for all systems have been outstanding since 1999.

Even so, there is nothing that we or any other provider can do to make everything 100% flawless and failure-free. We can simply try to minimize the chances of systems failing and have appropriate failover systems in place. Since there is always a small possibility of failure, providers always encourage users to create their own backups as well. Last week, we had a failure that resulted in some e-mail data loss for some customers. We are writing to inform you of this and outline the situation.

On Friday, we experienced a hardware failure on "mailbox2? which is the mailserver that facilitates e-mail delivery for your account. HostRocket had multiple backups in place. When this failure occurred, our technicians promptly began to replace the failed hardware and recover any lost data. With the advanced backup systems we have in place, the chance of multiple failures occurring simultaneously is incredibly small.

Unfortunately in this case, the backups in place did fail. For that reason, we experienced some permanent data loss on that server.

Note: This is only applicable to accounts with e-mail delivery facilitated by mailbox2. If you have accounts with mail delivery facilitated by other mailbox servers, you will be completely unaffected. Our records indicate that 1 or more of your accounts use the mailbox2 server.

E-mail that was in transit to you during the hardware failure was simply delayed. It was successfully delivered after complete restoration of e-mail service. However, e-mail data stored on the mailserver for IMAP and webmail users and could not be recovered. If you are a POP user and download your mail to your computer, your e-mail data was not stored on the server and was not affected.

E-mail preferences stored on the server were lost as well. You will need to recreate any e-mail aliases, autoresponders or forwarders you had previously established in order to be certain that your e-mail is being delivered correctly. If you used the mailing list system provided by HostRocket, you will need to recreate the mailing lists you had previously established.

Everyone at HostRocket knows and understands that e-mail is absolutely critical to many of you. We sincerely apologize for any inconveniences or loss of productivity this may have caused you or your business.

We will be reviewing the situation in entirety to see if there is anything that we can change to reduce the risk of this type of failure reoccurring in the future. We assure you that you can depend on HostRocket to provide the most reliable service possible just as we have for the past 5 years.

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to visit RocketSupport.com and contact us. Have a great week and thank you for your understanding and continued patronage.

Best Regards,

Brendan Brader
President & CEO
HostRocket.Com, Inc.

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