Hurricane Dorian headed to Florida

[UPDATE – 9/3/2019-10:00pm (EST)]
The grid is back online and ready for you!
Please continue to keep all those affected by this storm in your thoughts and prayers.

Hello All!

Not sure if you’ve seen this on the news, but there is a major Hurricane headed towards Florida right now and is expected to hit late Monday/Early Tuesday morning.
https://www.cbsnews.com/live-news/hurricane-dorian-updates-category-4-florida-latest-track-path-models-forecast-today-2019-08-31/

This would not be an issue for us except our data center is on the east coast and thus far, directly in the path of the expected landfall area.
We’ve been pretty lucky with the last couple of storms to hit that area and we “Sailed” through them without issues, but Dorian is expected to be the worst storm to hit the area since Andrew hit Florida back in 1992.
The “Risk” we would take by staying online is real. While the data center could be expected to withstand a storm of this magnitude, if we risk it and something goes wrong and they were to lose power there for any reason we risk corrupting our databases and if this were to happen, it would take more than a week to fix things and get the grid back online, but if we shut it down, along with our database servers, we should be ok depending on how fast the storm blows through and things get back to normal.

As the last couple of storms have proven, our data center has backup power generators and can still run with a loss of utility power as we had no downtime at all with the last couple of storms, even though the local utility, during one storm, was without power for more than 3 days, but this one could be a bit worse and we think it would be wise to simply take the grid offline until things are clear.
We’re sorry for the inconvenience, but the downtime we will realize by taking it offline would be far less than the downtime we would suffer if we had to repair things if we didn’t.

When we will take the grid offline?
It appears, at least at this time, the storm is expected to make landfall in Florida sometime Late Monday/Early Tuesday morning and if this holds true, we will take the grid offline at 6pm EST( 3pm Grid Time) on Monday, but we’ll keep watch on the storm and this time may need to be moved forward or back as we see how the storm progresses.

When will we have the grid back online?
Barring any major issues at our data center, and based on current expectations, we “Think” we may be able to bring it back online Late Tuesday afternoon, or early Tuesday evening (Eastern Standard Time Zone), but again, this will be determined by the storm’s progress, and any damage which our data center may or may not incur.

While our virtual lives may be disrupted for a bit, please remember the “Real” lives which are going to be directly affected by this storm and keep these people in your thoughts.

Thank You.
DigiWorldz Staff