The Last Podcast

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A Day of Outages: Amazon, Twitter, Disqus, WinExtra

Posted by Frederic On June - 6 - 2008

carl-icahn.jpgToday must be one of those days on the net (and it’s not even Friday the 13th yet – that’s next Friday!).

Amazon is still recovering from a large, international outage, Twitter is down and out (like that’s something new – but even istwitterdown.com is down right now, too), Disqus suffered some outages last night, and even my friend Steven Hodson’s WinExtra is offline right now.

I gather this is a good reminder about how cloud computing is prone to suffer these kinds of outages etc. etc. but really, it’s also a good reminder that while we tend to write and talk a lot about the outward, consumer facing side of the web, we do tend to ignore the plumbing behind it all – until it breaks.

I always feel like I’m a control freak when I want to host everything on my own site, but I did give in and install Disqus for comments – the convenience for my readers and for myself just outweighed the cost of a potential problem with Disqus. Even if they shut down at some point, I just turn on the old comment system again and move on.

But then, my email is exclusively on Gmail – and I don’t make backups of it, at all…

57 Comments

  1. syntaxerror says:

    wow. Disqus is also good.. Thanks for sharing.. I am new in the discuss..

  2. Learn Forex says:

    Disqus is the best! =)

  3. Same with me, I don't keep back ups for my comments, if it disqus goes down (far from happening), I might turn to intense debate..

  4. GED test says:

    So why these it happens..Try to use the safe items hereafter..Try to migrate from not working sites..

  5. Honestly disqus is the best. I really like it

  6. Nothing is better than disqus commenting system.. it really dominates big time.!!

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About Me

My name is Frederic. I am a PhD student and have been writing about technology on this blog for about the last three years. The focus of this blog is on Web 2.0, blogging, social media, and news aggregation.

These days, you can find most of my professional writing on ReadWriteWeb.

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