{"id":1262,"date":"2010-06-01T08:16:15","date_gmt":"2010-06-01T14:16:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/?p=1262"},"modified":"2010-09-12T00:38:44","modified_gmt":"2010-09-12T06:38:44","slug":"i-love-downtime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/?p=1262","title":{"rendered":"I love downtime"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nothing frustrates people more than a website going down at the same time they’re in need of it’s services. Just look to twitter when Media Temple<\/a> or Gmail<\/a>\u00a0experience unavailability; people lose their cool. Twitter was down so much that it\u00a0accidentally\u00a0popularized their growing pains via the fail whale.<\/p>\n

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I look at downtime a little differently, though. When I see all the hundreds of millions of WordPress.com blogs disappear for two hours<\/a>, I think to myself “let’s see how they handle this.” I breathe a sigh of relief when I read that WordPress.com was able to recover from a catastrophic failure costing millions of lost pageviews (read: revenue). In other words, there’s a service provider that can come back from downtime and I have no questions about whether they can handle a similar incident in the future.<\/p>\n

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Performing regular backups is not enough. When magnolia admitted to not having backups<\/a> of it’s users bookmarks, people were rightfully upset. But, even if they had been saved, would there have been a there a process in place to restore the data? Would service be restored in a timely manner? Even more, has the data ever been tested for recoverability or just thrown on a disk or into the cloud assuming everything is all set in case of emergency?<\/p>\n

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When I see pinboard<\/a>, my favorite bookmarking service, take a spill twice in two weeks<\/a>\u00a0I rest peacefully. I go to sleep knowing that\u00a0Maciej has a hot backup server that he can quickly switch to and continue running with just a few minutes of downtime. I love that. No data will be lost, just a hiccup in the day. One hiccup that, if it were to happen yet again, could easily be handled.<\/p>\n

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Of course, my data is portable in many of these cases. I can extract it at any time and back it up however I choose. There’s no reason to rely on my service provider. But, that’s really not the point of portability. Even though there may be no service agreement, you’re using a service with some (perhaps incorrect) assumptions that it will always be there and always work. Perhaps that’s an issue with free services, they need not provide any guarantee.<\/p>\n

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But even the services we pay heavily for: our web hosts, the photo storage sites, the hosted project management tools. Some of these sites and services have gone on untested and unproven. I’m a little more wary of what might happen if something unforeseen happens to them. Could\u00a0flickr recover from an issue<\/a>\u00a0and maintain my priceless photos and memories. Could my business still operate if 37signals went down<\/a>? Am I paying them for any guarantee of restored service? I honestly don’t know. Even web hosts store backups, but that snapshot may have included the virus that originally took your site down… that’s no help.<\/p>\n

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I love downtime because it shows me how a provider will handle an adverse situation both in and out of their control.<\/p>\n

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Did you enjoy this post? You should recommend me to be listed in the tumblr directory<\/a>. Thanks!<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nothing frustrates people more than a website going down at the same time they’re in need of it’s services. Just look to twitter when Media Temple or Gmail\u00a0experience unavailability; people lose their cool. Twitter was down so much that it\u00a0accidentally\u00a0popularized their growing pains via the fail whale. I look at downtime a little […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-internet"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1262"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1262\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1263,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1262\/revisions\/1263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}