Any business worth its salt knows that you never put all your eggs in one basket no matter how good an idea it may seem at the time. It is always a strategy which will cause problems. It is only a matter of waiting for that ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ catastrophic event to happen.
In the week that just passed the unthinkable happened when Amazon Web Services collapsed bringing down with it Quore, Foursquare, Digg (apparently) and inconveniencing many hundreds of other clients who were relying on its…erm, reliability.
Is this a failure of the Cloud or another example of ‘laziness’ amongst website engineers? Neither apparently, though Amazon’s failure teaches a valuable lesson which FathomDB founder Justin Santa Barbara analyses aptly in his blog explaining why the failure happened and what can be learnt from it.
The basic lesson here is that when you run a business you need to have as many back-up plans as you possibly can and then, even those may not be enough, in which case your contingency plans in case of online access point failure (critical for any online business) is crucial.
This is the same whether you run a hu8ge social website (like FourSquare) or a single website with a much narrower focus. Your hosting solution had better be rock-solid or sooner or later you will be burnt.
Learn how to optimize your content for the Cloud.
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I’ve led the discussion on how social media and SEO are changing the processes we use to work and live, online, with the publication of my book ‘The Social Media Mind’. I combine experience in journalism and blue-chip corporate management with a penchant for explaining complex issues in simple terms. Contact me for media interviews, presentations and panel discussions
