Web service disaster planning

[mdlbear]

This blog post was written after an inquiry about Amazon's EC2 and S3 services, but it applies much more generally to anyone trying to run a business and depending on an outside service provider. LJ comes to mind, for example. Amazon's terms and conditions include the following disturbing paragraph, which I suspect is not at all unusual in such places:

We further reserve the right to discontinue Amazon Web Services, any Services, or any portion or feature thereof for any reason and at any time in our sole discretion. Upon any termination or notice of any discontinuance, you must immediately stop your use of the applicable Service(s), and delete all Amazon Properties in your possession or control (including from your Application and your servers). Sections 3, 5, 8 - 12, any definitions that are necessary to give effect to the foregoing provisions, and any payment obligations will survive any termination of this Agreement and will continue to bind you and us in accordance with their terms.

In other words, we can pull the plug on you at any time, on no notice at all, but you still have to pay us if you owe us any money.

Think about your web hosting service, your ISP, your online banking, web email provider, your web storefront provider, your blogging service (gestures toward SixApart),... Which of them have real SLA's (that's Service Level Agreements for us Luddites) and which have terms like Amazon's?

Now: which of them is your business depending on, and what are your disaster plans if they suddenly go belly-up, get taken out by the local flavor of natural disaster, or simply get distracted by the next shiny bubble-of-the-year and decide they don't want to play anymore?

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to do some serious planning.

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

I would be willing to discuss mutual disaster recovery coverage....

[mdlbear]

I'll be setting up a blob server soon on my dreamhost.com site (currently http://steve.savitzky.net/ ). Current plan is to use git for everything public or semi-public, and encrypted git blobs for home directories.

It's not entirely coincidental that I'm working on an efficient file format for blobs at work.

[lisa-marli.livejournal.com]

Jennie had a ton of fun. Jenasjewels.com was her web site, but she originally got if from someone who claimed they were the domain owner to the people who keep track of these things, so when they decided to stop hosting her website, she couldn't get the name away from them. She's now owner of jenasjewelrysensations.com Longer, but she's made sure she's on the domain listing this time.
And I've already have one ISP Earthlink buy out my old ISP and then periodically cut off service because they didn't really want us (they wanted the high end commercial business not us pions). After one really bad service cut off, in which no one would admit that they were breaking their contract, we dropped them and went to AT&T. We kept an alternate dial up service going for years just to keep an alternate until they decided they didn't want to do it any more and we got switched to... Earthlink, who would charge us an additional fee to our webhosting to keep the dial up. We dropped the alternate dial up.
I ain't crazy about AT&T but at least they aren't going anywhere soon. Meanwhile, if our webhoster tries to drop harrigan.org, we'll just go someplace else. Luckily finding someone to handle e-mail and a simple web site is relatively easy, and we are listed as domain owners.
I won't go into the fun that Mythopoeic Society is having keeping our "free" web hosting going. As a non-profit we don't have the money. Michael Wallace has been helping us with it, but sooner or later we are going to have to find something else, since he really has dropped out of the web hosting business.
I would say life was easier before, but there have always been problems, we just have to try to plan ahead...

[mdlbear]

Yeah; owning your own domain is definitely the way to go. For cheap web hosting you can't easily beat dreamhost.com -- their minimum account is something like $7.95/month for as many domains as you want, and enough storage that you can do backups to it as long as you're not doing much audio or video.

We recently switched our DSL service from AT&T PacBell SBC AT&T to sonic.net. About $10/month more for 15 times the bandwidth.

[smalltowndad.livejournal.com]

Good advice.

Best wishes with your planning.

Now, I need to do some of my own. You reminded me that my blog entries are at risk. Individually, they're hardly worth the pixels they're displayed on: but there's a remote chance that a selection might be worth re-posting, or maybe publishing.

But only if they're available to me, and indexed in some way.

Back to work.

[mdlbear]

There are several ways of backing up all your posts, and one or two of getting the comments on them as well; see the FAQ.

As far as I know the only way to get your comments on other peoples' posts is to have them mailed to you when you make them; this also gets you a copy of the post.