Over the weekend Facebook suffered a multiple hardware failure that caused its photo service to fail. Up to 15% of the site’s multiple-billion photos displayed as nothing more than a question mark on Sunday night.
Facebook is already in the process of cleaning up the mess and restoring the lost files, but the failure is just another example highlighting the importance of making backups of our own data rather than relying on “the cloud” for permanence.
Until recently, Always Get Better was hosted by GoDaddy. We moved in November so I could have better control of the various web sites I am running. I can say that I was not unhappy with the service offered by GoDaddy – I just outgrew it.
I guess I got lucky this time. According to cnet, GoDaddy was struck by a denial-of-service attack on the morning of January 14, 2008. There are conflicting reports (naturally) of the exact number of sites affected ranging from several to several thousand.
The Ontario government has a program designed to provide funding for the purposes of building broadband internet infrastructure in rural communities. The Rural Connections Broadband Program has earmarked millions of dollars to build new infrastructure, which will bring high-speed Internet to communities where low population densities preclude the construction of more traditional networks (such as cable).
This is great for users who, until now, have only been able to dream about leaving dial-up behind and joining the rest of the world. Unfortunately, the solution to rural internet involves either unreliable satellite installations, or line-of-site cellular towers.
I can say from experience that the line-of-site towers work great but they are only able to service a limited number of users. Service providers don’t want to admit they are over-selling their towers resulting in dropped connections and complete outages for their subscribers. Trees are another problem; much of rural Ontario exists within bushland, so unless homeowners are willing to shell out for 90-foot towers on their home, they still may not get to count on their Internet.
Although, I will admit, the cost of a tower would be far less than the cost of laying underground cable.
I recently transferred AlwaysGetBetter.com from GoDaddy to MediaTemple. Although their administrative interface was somewhat, I found GoDaddy’s hosting service decent enough to meet my needs so the move has nothing to do with dissatisfaction in their service.
MediaTemple was recommended to me by a close programmer friend who has been using their service for some time and had nothing but glowing reviews for them. So far the hosting seems alright – the setup was almost instantaneous and the administrative tools very easy to work with. Their pricing is a little on the high side but certainly not unreasonable.
