Continuing power problems at a Los Angeles telecom building have caused more outages for hosting companies, who are working to reassure frustrated customers about the extended downtime.

The Garland Building (1200 W. 7th) lost power for the second time in five days last Friday, causing significant downtime for both Dreamhost and Media Temple. A July 24 outage at the building that knocked MySpace offline was subsequently blamed on malfuctions in a power transfer system and UPS unit. On July 28, the building suffered another loss of power, attributed to an electrical short.

The problems have been most acute for DreamHost, which has been struggling with network troubles in between outages. DreamHost, which hosts about 285,000 hostnames, provided a detailed summary of the problems in a blog post titled Anatomy of a(n Ongoing) Disaster.

"We never want to have another July 2006 again," Josh Jones writes in the blog, which provides technical details of the problems but also sought to use humor to lighten the mood, illustrating the post with photos from notable disasters. "Our number one priority right now is getting this nagging network problem understood and fixed. ... We’re also going to be buying our own UPSes, since we have learned we can’t trust our data center OR our building to do it."

MediaTemple indicated that it had lost patience with the uptime problems at 1200 W. 7th. "This incident is clearly an unacceptable situation for our company and our customers," the company said in a message to customers (posted here). "Media Temple has decided to accelerate its plans to move all customers in (IDC-LA2) to a new data center which has undergone exhaustive testing to insure such power issues will not be a problem in the future." Media Temple also said it would be making its CEO available to speak by phone with concerned customers.