You might have heard of Hurricane Ike.  It hit Galveston and Houston, TX pretty hard, knocking out power to about 2.5 million people.  My parents live in Dickinson, TX which is only about 4 miles from Galveston Bay.  They’re fine and their house suffered little damage, but it’s been really hard to get news of their specific neighborhood.  Why?  Because apparently both Dickinson ISD (my mother’s employer) and the City of Dickinson’s web sites have been down since Ike came through.  I don’t know this for definite, but the obvious conclusion I came to is that both sites are hosted in Dickinson.  When the power went out, so did they.  Netcraft can’t see them, either.  For all I know, they’re sitting on a server that’s currently underwater.  So now, at a time when the sites are most crucially needed, they aren’t available.  People would like to know if it’s safe to come home, and it would be nice to know what to expect when they get there.   

I can’t think of a more perfect example of the need for colocation.  The Dickinson sysadmins should be ashamed of themselves.