Can the weather knock your site offline?

Weather stormQuestion: Can a major storm or major weather event cause your website to go offline?

Answer: Yes, a major storm such as a hurricane, typhoon, tornado, earthquake, snowstorm, or even thunderstorm can cause your site to go offline. If your site is hosted in a single datacenter and that datacenter is hit by a storm. Your datacenter can experience power disruptions, lack of people on site, and even a fiber cut.

Most major datacenter operators do a survey of the environment and expected natural disasters that can disrupt a datacenter’s operations. Some datacenter owners disregard this information and build their datacenter where it costs the least. While other datacenter owners take such information into consideration and their planning.

If you have your server colocated in a datacenter that didn’t do careful planning and the region is known to be hit by storms. Your datacenter may get knocked offline in the future if you do not plan ahead.