Power outage or not, Combell keeps your online business running!

The issues related to power supply in Belgium this winter are quite worrisome. What does this mean for your online business?

If it gets too cold this winter, things could turn awry – due to an unfortunate chain of events, the Belgian electric power plants may not be able to handle the demand. Two nuclear reactors were indeed shut down for maintenance (Tihange 2 and Doel 3), and due to sabotage, Doel 4 is now also shut down – although that one could possibly be relaunched sooner than expected.

Currently though, half of the nuclear capacity of our country is unavailable. If a consumption peak is reached this winter, the high voltage network administrator will have to take measures to avoid a total black-out. Certain customers and regions will be disconnected from the Internet in a controlled fashion, which is called a brown-out. Without wanting to sow panic, now is the time to stop and think about what this could mean for you and your company. Your physical business and your home could probably be powered temporarily with an emergency generator, but what about your online store?

If you chose Combell for your hosting, we have good news for you. Our servers are located in the most advanced data centres, which will be equipped to handle such power cuts. Should the energy supply be cut off, the UPS systems would immediately be engaged to keep everything running for a few minutes, until the emergency generators (which are constantly on standby) take over.

The data centre where Combell hosts your data is equipped with 11 generators, which each have a diesel supply of 48 hours. Three diesel providers are on standby to replenish that supply. And to play it even safer, we picked one standby supplier in the Netherlands; a huge demand for diesel could in fact arise at that point in Belgium. Of course, other suppliers in the Netherlands, Germany and France could also be involved. That way, the generators can be kept running almost indefinitely if necessary. So, just like our generators, your business would stay up and running.

Did you entrust your hosting to another provider, which is not able to offer you these guarantees? It is not too late yet to quickly switch providers. Combell developed a free tool, the Combell Mover, who makes it possible to migrate your website and online store to our data centre without a single problem.

There. You can rest easy again, knowing that Combell watches over your online business!