Sys-admins throughout Puget Sound had their long weekend disrupted on Friday when a fire at Fisher Plaza shut down power to their mission-critical data center. Thousands of websites were knocked offline, including the transaction processor Authorize.Net, the heavily-visited Microsoft Bing Travel, and AdHost, themselves a shared hosting provider for thousands more business and personal websites (here’s a partial list of affected websites).

As it happens, this wasn’t the first such outage at Fisher Plaza, where data service was also interrupted last year due to a similar electrical fire. Michael Young, CTO of real estate listings site Redfin, deserves kudos for recognizing the point of failure and instituting a disaster recovery plan. As he explained to TechFlash:

We were pretty embarrassed last June when Adhost had a similar electrical fire and took our site down for 8 hours (well into our core business hours) with brown-outs a day or two after that had us scrambling. ‘Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me’ resonated in our brains.

So by October 2008, we basically instituted a disaster avoidance plan where we had redundant-everything for our mission-critical databases, servers and networks in separate buildings.

When the problem happened last night, our beepers went off, we saw what looked like a major outage in one building, and were able to switch to the redundant systems.

Well done, Redfin!

This also seems like a good opportunity to put in a plug for Dreamhost, my own current hosting provider, with whom I’ve never had any day-long (or even half-day-long) outages, fire-related or otherwise. And remember: wherever you do your web hosting, a disaster recovery plan is a necessity, not a luxury.

After writing a glowing Dreamhost review, I was reminded that Dreamhost has a referral program that allows existing customers (me!) to offer discounts to new customers (you!), while receiving a modest referral bonus (yay!). Here are the Dreamhost Coupon details, exclusively for readers of Bits & Bytes 2.0.

In need of a Monday mental health break? Check out The Adventures of Action Item, Professional Superhero, which is amusing…