Digital Marketing thinktank eConsultancy recently wrote about Amazon’s latest – and most prominent to date – colossal fail of their cloud hosting service. This isn’t the first time Amazon has crashed hard (it wasn’t that long ago they went down for nearly a week), but this time some big names were involved.
How big is big? How about names like Pinterest, Instagram and some little outfit called Netflix?
Questions continue to swirl around Amazon has the visibility of their hosting problems continue to rise.
McMillan notes, “A storm shouldn’t have taken out Amazon’s backup generators.”
A storm? Really? Hopefully there is more to this … but clearly, no hosting provider is too big to fail. The choice each company faces is: Understanding that hosting failures are bound to happen, do they opt to tolerate some level of downtime or invest significant resources in hosting across several different providers in hopes of achieving something closer to 100% uptime?
That is scary if big sites like Netflix and Instagram can be taken offline by a “storm”. It almost makes me wonder if I too should be looking for other hosting options that are more reliable for my website. Can you recommend a reliable host that I can quickly transfer my site over to their server?
This is so disappointing, its Amazon. They should have at least some sort of concern to their name and should have provided a top-notch service like what people expect with their big name in the industry. This proves that the name doesn’t always show the quality of business. A business, big or small can fail.
@omgomgomg, I think the point is that even the most reliable companies are unable to be 100% perfect all the time. As @arajoo said, big and small businesses will have failures – you just have to look at the big picture of overall uptime AND hosting performance.
Wow, this is surprising. Nothing is perfect, but I’d expect Amazon to be more stable. It isn’t too bad; sites have downtime sometimes. It’s unavoidable. It’s probably just the way the information is presented that it makes me think Amazon is unreliable. Nothing is fail-proof.
Well,nothing is fail proof as far as I can see. If it can happen to Amazon it can happen to us all. No matter the redundancy there is always a weak point,or a point of possible failure,no matter how small or remote the possibility,the said possibility still remains,at the very least,remote.
It appears that Amazon and few others learned valuable lessons with that experience. Unfortunately, others did not take heed and had to deal with those very same outage issues when Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast this past weekend. I was really surprised to find the Huffington Post amongst the list of sites taken offline due to the storm.
True. Experience could really teach us a lot. The major concern there is if you are also open to learn from it or not.
The troubling thing to me, is the number of large companies who did not learn from the problems that Amazon experienced. I was surprised at the number of websites that were down during Hurricane Sandy. Large sites like Huffington Post should have absolutely no problem affording a backup system in cases of emergency. Why they still haven’t invested in this is something I simply don’t understand.
Ditto. Companies should definitely invest in a strong and stable backup system. The long-term cost would be lower than the long-term cost of having your website down during emergencies.
I seriously hadn’t heard anything like this before. To my knowledge Amazon is considered a foremost authority when it comes to cloud computing and most of the people used to recommend them all the time. When I used to hear cloud computing, it was always followed by Amazon.
From what you say, it seems like they are no good either. I haven’t tried them out either, so really dont know how well their service is.
I think other companies have already paid their dues on cloud computing. Some who may have sprouted after Amazon could even do better than the frontrunner. I suggest you look for reviews first so you will be guided.
I found it to be surprising that such a big company is having these hosting issues. Perhaps it is linked to the fact that Amazon’s main business is not about hosting. While they may be able to have good up time for amazon.com it does not mean that they have the means to host many other websites like hostgator (for example) does. But, I agree that no one is too big to fail.
I had no idea that Amazon was out for a week! And I can’t understand how a storm could affect them so much! They should have backup generators for their backup generators! Amazon should just play around with this kind of stuff because their reputation is on the line. Just invest some money into this and you won’t have to deal with such issues.