

Analyst on Amazon EC2: "We don't advise anybody to use this for anything mission-critical" - ilamont
http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/04/07/amazon-web-services-has-another-outage

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SwellJoe
I've been saying this about EC2 for some time (and we have a product that
manages EC2 instances, so I have a vested interest in seeing EC2 become
successful). It's just not very reliable, when compared to the best hosts in
the business--while EC2 downtime per year can be measured in hours, the best
hosts are down minutes or seconds each year (of course, your apps and your
system administration abilities can easily make up the difference--we've been
offline a couple of times due to Joomla problems, and there's nothing a more
reliable network or server could do about it). But, every bit of downtime adds
up...and maybe your next big customer or investor was looking at your site at
that very moment.

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astrec
Our hosting spend is around $1m AUD a year (although a lot of that is
bandwidth which is expensive in AU) and the datacentre we use took all its
customers offline for 2 hours last week. It happens. Even the to the big guys.

~~~
SwellJoe
You should check with Netcraft's reliability rankings next time. 2 hours is an
awfully long time for a "big guy".

Sure, downtime happens. Routers are upgraded and power bounced (30 seconds of
downtime if the admins are good), UPS infrastructure is kept up-to-date and in
working order (minutes of downtime), and server components break. The last one
is possibly a lot of downtime...but hopefully MTBF works for you and the
server that you keep for the average lifecycle of hosting servers (about 30
months) never fails catastrophically.

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gibsonf1
From our experience last night, 1 or more Amazon datacenters went off the net.
Our instance kept chugging along while it was unavailable (but we didn't know
this at the time). We were firing up another instance in a different data
center (using the new trusted zones feature) when the outage ceased and our
site on the original instance resurfaced.

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erickhill
Nice - there's a vote of confidence.

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icey
EC2 is still in beta. The fact that a beta was down for an hour at 2am
shouldn't be newsworthy.

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keating
Even as a beta that beats the uptime for a lot of other services I've used.

