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Yeah the snotty attitude advanced in the article is pretty offensive. If you run something on the internet and rely on it for your dinner, you don't really have

by iigs 17y ago

Yeah the snotty attitude advanced in the article is pretty offensive. If you run something on the internet and rely on it for your dinner, you don't really have an excuse for single points of failure. Do your job. It's exceptionally easy to engineer around these issues if you don't just outsource all of your thinking to a provider.

antirez 17y ago
without to mention how trivial is to replicate a blog.
drusenko 17y ago
I don't know, I sort of side with TechCrunch on this one. Yes, you can replicate a site (some easier than others, and a blog should be relatively easy), but that's still no excuse for datacenter downtime, and Rackspace has had a prolific amount of downtime. Any datacenter downtime is serious business -- at a good datacenter, it's a small-ish incident every few years. Rackspace, on the other hand, seems to have a large incident every few months, meaning it's probably best to take your servers elsewhere.
- ghshephard 17y ago
  I used to think that Data Center Downtime was serious business, but I've come around to believing that it shouldn't be. If your data center going down is a problem, then you don't really have a very robust failover plan. If, instead, you _plan_ for the Data Center to go down, and treat a data center failure as a trivial issue, then your DR plans start to become significantly more robust. In particular, the companies that I admire are ones that routinely swap, on a routine basis, their DR and production facilities - and when a production data center goes down they don't even bother to wait - they just light up the DR center and are back in business. Most of the SaaS Financial Hosting companies (Oracle Financials) that I've talked with will provide you with that feature.
aaronbrethorst 17y ago
MG Siegler, the author, isn't exactly the most technically astute person around, which isn't inherently bad except that he doesn't seem to recognize his own limitations around such matters. MG has a bad tendency of breathlessly reporting and misreporting on issues that are far outside of his area of expertise. One of my favorite examples happened a month ago when MG misdiagnosed CSS files not loading on Twitter as 'BRAND NEW FEATURES THAT ARE UGLY, OMG!' (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/17/twitter-just-ui-puked-on-my-timeline/ http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/17/twitter-just-ui-puked-o...).
nikcub 17y ago
We have a backup. Guess where it was. Now guess where it will be tonight.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
Confusion 17y ago
It's exceptionally easy to engineer around these issues if you don't just outsource all of your thinking to a provider. Can we stop blaming internet companies for outsourcing certain responsibilities? A decent hosting provider should ensure there isn't a single point of failure in their service. You don't ask a random company to set up their own accountancy department either: there are specialized companies to which you can outsource that. They bear the responsibility for faulty reports, as Rackspace bears the responsibility for not having a decent failover setup. As a specialist of some sort, you have better things to do than to think about what is needed for a proper failover setup. Especially because you will still miss certain subtle details, because you are not an expert in handling a datacentre failure. You should hire experts to set that up for you and a hosting provider has those experts. Honest to God, what's with this attitude of 'if something on the internet fails, it's your own fault, because we are all smart enough to take care of all those contingencies'? 1: we aren't; failover handling is prone to subtle bugs. What tptacek keeps saying about security also holds for contingency handling. 2: it's not smart to spend your time bothering with intricate, but ultimately mundane, issues that can be outsourced.

by iigs 17y ago

antirez 17y ago

without to mention how trivial is to replicate a blog.

drusenko 17y ago

I don't know, I sort of side with TechCrunch on this one. Yes, you can replicate a site (some easier than others, and a blog should be relatively easy), but that's still no excuse for datacenter downtime, and Rackspace has had a prolific amount of downtime. Any datacenter downtime is serious business -- at a good datacenter, it's a small-ish incident every few years. Rackspace, on the other hand, seems to have a large incident every few months, meaning it's probably best to take your servers elsewhere.

ghshephard 17y ago
I used to think that Data Center Downtime was serious business, but I've come around to believing that it shouldn't be. If your data center going down is a problem, then you don't really have a very robust failover plan. If, instead, you _plan_ for the Data Center to go down, and treat a data center failure as a trivial issue, then your DR plans start to become significantly more robust. In particular, the companies that I admire are ones that routinely swap, on a routine basis, their DR and production facilities - and when a production data center goes down they don't even bother to wait - they just light up the DR center and are back in business. Most of the SaaS Financial Hosting companies (Oracle Financials) that I've talked with will provide you with that feature.

aaronbrethorst 17y ago

MG Siegler, the author, isn't exactly the most technically astute person around, which isn't inherently bad except that he doesn't seem to recognize his own limitations around such matters. MG has a bad tendency of breathlessly reporting and misreporting on issues that are far outside of his area of expertise. One of my favorite examples happened a month ago when MG misdiagnosed CSS files not loading on Twitter as 'BRAND NEW FEATURES THAT ARE UGLY, OMG!' (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/17/twitter-just-ui-puked-on-my-timeline/ http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/17/twitter-just-ui-puked-o...).

nikcub 17y ago

We have a backup. Guess where it was. Now guess where it will be tonight.

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

Confusion 17y ago

It's exceptionally easy to engineer around these issues if you don't just outsource all of your thinking to a provider. Can we stop blaming internet companies for outsourcing certain responsibilities? A decent hosting provider should ensure there isn't a single point of failure in their service. You don't ask a random company to set up their own accountancy department either: there are specialized companies to which you can outsource that. They bear the responsibility for faulty reports, as Rackspace bears the responsibility for not having a decent failover setup. As a specialist of some sort, you have better things to do than to think about what is needed for a proper failover setup. Especially because you will still miss certain subtle details, because you are not an expert in handling a datacentre failure. You should hire experts to set that up for you and a hosting provider has those experts. Honest to God, what's with this attitude of 'if something on the internet fails, it's your own fault, because we are all smart enough to take care of all those contingencies'? 1: we aren't; failover handling is prone to subtle bugs. What tptacek keeps saying about security also holds for contingency handling. 2: it's not smart to spend your time bothering with intricate, but ultimately mundane, issues that can be outsourced.