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Started by Dean Allen (the developer of TextPattern). Their redundancy is crazy, and the prices are really pretty decent.
Matt (from WP) is on the team at TextDrive...
John Evans
Robert: Normal businesses have their primary web presences sitting on overloaded, shared servers in the corner of a datacenter somewhere. To them, thirty minutes of downtime is a really good week.
Yahoo and Microsoft maps just don't match the simplicity and quality of Google's maps. There's a reason they are #1.
Thanks for stopping by yesterday, we had a great time! We really believe that a new kind of network is coming where the applications being developed (whether web, xml, web services, etc) are designed to communicate with the network to facilitate their health, security, and responsiveness.
You didn't mention a link to our site so I'll post it here for any readers interested:
http://www.f5.com
http://devcentral.f5.com
Roger, As for 30 minutes of downtime being a really good week, I'm not sure what "normal business" you are referring to, but that could equate from thousands to millions of dollars of lost revenue. Not so much for free services, but think about a financial service or any form of eCommerce site. If their site is not running at optimal performance (sub second response) or simple down, a customer will fine somewhere else to do their business and that will not only lose them revenue in the immediate term, but also all future income from that user.
And this doesn't boil down to just websites, services are very important as well. As we move into SOA infrastructures and WebServices start to gain more of a presence then their availability, responsiveness, and security are critical to their success.
Bottom line: If you are using a service, demand multi-site fault-tolerance. If you are running a service, make sure you are prepared for spikes traffic or disaster recovery plans.
-Joe
I'm not saying you don't know your stuff, but if Robert thinks that failover is enough to keep things up to 5 or 6 9s (there's no such thing as a 100% system), he needs to step into the real world.
Also, someone should explain to him how costs grow exponentially with each 9 added. If failover or fault tolerance were enough, most companies would just need 3 servers (2 paired in one DC, the backup in a second DC) and they'd "automatically" have 4-5 9s of uptime.
Again, Joe, not that you don't know your stuff. Looking at F5, it looks like you do. And it's likely not your fault Robert walked away with a simplified view of uptime management (it was likely only a few hours you shared, after all).
I just don't like to see things so over-simplified, or to see Robert griping about a free, beta service, being down for half an hour ... Especially after the outages he's coming from, or the outages his friends are experiencing on services they PAY for, and which have been public for a year or two.
Best of luck with F5 Joe :)
But, when you build a business, you better think about these things. You might make the decision to go with a low-cost provider (like I have) but that decision may have consequences for you down the line.
You stated yourself that Wordpress.com is in beta and the software it runs on is only in alpha (if that) so why exactly are you running a high profile blog on it that you expect 100% uptime for?
It's not a simple world and the level of availability any company provides should be a strategic one (just like the level of company any customer goes with). Right now, availability likely isn't all that important to the Wordpress.com folk, since it's in beta and all.
It's expensive as well. At b5media, we're just about to go to a load-balanced solution (40% increase in costs). Next we'll go to a failover-based one (another 60% increase in costs). Finally we'll go to a closer-to-enterprise one (another 50% increase).
This stuff is expensive. Sometimes you need to make a choice between your business existing and your business being alive. It's what happens when you boot-strap.
How can you customize the template of your wordpress blog?
http://tinyurl.com/e3pnt
The October data will be out in the next couple days. Some of these providers offer reasonably priced accounts. But they're not hooked into the world of blogging, because bloggers are a price-sensitive bunch.
You asked what happens when one of our devices goes down. We'll that depends on how fault tolerant you have made the system. Of course, if you have a single device fronting a single datacenter, then that's not the most optimal solution. Within a data center we recommend you deploy devices in redundant pairs so that if for some reason one device fails, the other will take over the workload of the first device seemlessly.
That gets you to single data center redundancy, but what if the whole data center goes down (wide area power outages) or your data center experiences huge unanticipated spikes in traffic that fill it's available bandwidth? In this case you really need a intelligent multi-datacenter solution based on DNS (which we offer by the way). DNS is distributed in nature so it is very simple to setup a grid of these devices across different data centers to pick up the load and failure on a single one of these devices will not impact routing as the others will automatically pick up the work of the failed unit.
Let's say you are hosting a site www.foo.com. A client does a DNS lookup on that domain to find the correct routable ip address to connect to. If you have an intelligent DNS system it will be able to return an address for the most acceptable datacenter.
-Joe
High availability starts with the hardware (RAID, mutliple power supplies, multiple power systems, multiple cooling systems, independent NIC's) on the server and goes up to per-configuration availability (fault tolerance and failover), through load balancing and DNS to multi-DC setups, backup DNS setups, off-site, non-live setups and a whole host of other things.
I've designed systems that have (knock on wood) never gone down (primary patient care systems). But the reality was that to get a 1-server application to 7 9s of availability (with a full failover so that total downtime would be nanoseconds, which was still a lot) cost upwards of 150K$.
This stuff isn't cheap. It's fun (:D), but it isn't cheap.
This is a fascinating dialogue. It also highlights how the role of a network is changing quickly. The notion of how many "9's" a company needs is an interesting - and critical - discussion. Need varies based upon the business requirements and budget tolerance.
But, here's a different angle on the cost factor. What if you could build an application that ensures total uptime during datacenter/app updates while automating the process through app and network integration? The cost savings in CLI/management effort is significant with total error reduction (i.e. downtime).
Or, if the device is smart enough to read and understand the datastream and sanitize it to ensure that sensitive information never leaves the datacenter, what's that worth? (think credit card numbers? SS#s?) It's kind of like those Mastercard ads... Cost of servers? $$$... Cost of network hardware? $$$... Avoiding the costs of telling your 30,000 customers that you *may* have leaked their credit card numbers? Priceless. ;-)
We've got an iRule on DevCentral that does this. (http://devcentral.f5.com).
We're getting to the point where the value of applications running on smart network devices can more than cover the cost of the network gear (and servers, for that matter).
Uptime and fault tolerance are the foundation to deploying any web app or service. Using more advanced features (APIs, rules, etc.) offer a completely different way of looking at cost/value/business criticality.
- Jeff
Annoying? Yes. Terrible? No. No one's business depends on WP.com being up 99.9% of the time. Nor does a business depend on having their blog up all of the time.
Also, I assume/hope this maintenance was scheduled, so users knew to expect a 30-min outage. When I used other hosting services, I appreciated their notifications scheduled downtime. If your service isn't free, I'd expect scheduled maintenance to be done late Saturday night or early Sunday morning, when it would have the least impact on traffic.
On another note, I think demanding redundant, fault-tolerant, 100%-uptime, RAIDed, load-balanced servers for one's weblog is akin to demanding that your coffee be served in a double-walled platinum carafe: It might be nice, but it's really not worth the price. We're talking blogs here, not e-commerce.
Each user needs to determine how much uptime is really worth for them. With the vast majority of hosts, the vast majority of bloggers will never experience unscheduled downtime. The difference in downtime between a $5 a month normal host and a $99 a month uber-redundant host will be imperceptible.
I feel bad for Susan Bradley (http://msmvps.com/bradley/) she is really trying to get us to a better server, and this keeps happening. She is doing this, from what I believe, all on her own dime. I thank her for everything, and feel bad when people complain about the server down time.
I don't think so. Most companies don't even have a blog let alone servers and hosting serives for them.
We the comunity is crying "wolf" just because it is something (blog hosting) we are paying for and want service and uptime. When it blogs become mission critcal then one will find apps and servers being jelled together to obtain "best of class" attriubtion. Till then sitback and expect that we will have "noise" failure for interim moments of time!!