Every business endeavor has associated risks, which can be mitigated in a variety of ways for a variety of costs. Offloading the responsibility for continuatio

Every business endeavor has associated risks, which can be mitigated in a variety of ways for a variety of costs. Offloading the responsibility for continuation of your business to Linode (or any other data center provider) is unfair. A history of uptime, verbal promises, or fancy SLA terms should never be interpreted to mean that disasters won't happen. A ten day long DDOS is a disaster and in this case a man-made disaster. Using Linode (or another provider) instead of building your own data center is more cost effective, but it means you are no longer in direct control of your infrastructure (decreased costs, increased risk). Designing your application to span multiple availability zones (data centers) can mitigate single points of failure within a single vendor but is more expensive than operating in a single zone. Designing your application to span multiple vendors can mitigate single vendor failures (or changes in offerings from a single vendor) but is even more expensive. And still there are ways to mitigate these costs, business interruption insurance can help cover the costs for moving to a new data center or vendor in case of a disaster (such as hiring staff, overtime, etc.). Lost profits can be covered by business interruption insurance also. Of course it is expensive to operate any business in a hostile environment. A seaside restaurant better be prepared to weather a hurricane. I wonder how much money has been spent on security cameras, guards, metal detectors, and so on since 9/11? The increasing occurrence of targeted DDOS (and other types) of attacks is the physical equivalent of an increasingly hostile environment and is going to be associated with higher costs. In the longer term, I think we need to find ways to get law enforcement better suited to deal with these problems but ultimately I think we'll need to radically change the way we handle network operations and the technical foundations of the network such as content centric networking (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_centric_networking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_centric_networking)