

No more downtime - Amazon S3 based external JavaScript hosting - paraschopra
http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/no-more-downtime-amazon-s3-based-external-javascript-hosting/

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pierrefar
But S3 does go down, even if they have SLAs. A Google search is your friend:

<http://www.google.com/search?q=amazon+s3+downtime>

I don't think anyone can guarantee downtime, but you sure can minimize it.

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paraschopra
Yes, fully agree with you. But Amazon will have thousands of engineers 24x7
for fixing up if things go really bad. Amazon S3 is a way to ensure someone
will be working to get the site up again if servers go down 2 am in the
morning and _somehow_ SMS alerts don't reach my phone.

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tybris
S3 is meant as a storage system and very reliable in storing bits, but not
serving them. CloudFront is meant as a CDN and very reliable in serving bits.

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paraschopra
Doesn't CloudFront builds over S3? I was reading about CloudFront and what I
understand is that it is basically a distribution mechanism for S3.

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MicahWedemeyer
Yes, CF is a CDN that sits on top of S3. It's usually very easy to turn on.
Spend the hour to get it all running and you'll be glad you did.

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paraschopra
Yes, was just reading the comparision here
[http://www.bucketexplorer.com/documentation/cloudfront--
amaz...](http://www.bucketexplorer.com/documentation/cloudfront--amazon-s3-vs-
amazon-cloudfront.html)

Sadly, it says changes on Cloud Front take 24 hours to refresh plus it doesn't
support HTTPS. While the latter is still okay but the first condition defeats
the purpose of the whole setup.

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pvg
You are still better off simply making a copy of the JS you are including and
not having to put that 'huge responsibility' on someone else. It's the code
you've tested against, after all. And if you feel S3 provides better
reliability, you can put it there yourself. S3 fallback isn't going to do
anything about 'I'm letting arbitrary 3rd party code run on my page'.

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paraschopra
That will not work for my specific case because even if my users include
static JS file, they cannot include static JS file which will stall their
browser in case the server falls.

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olegk
If your servers go down, how will JS files on S3 will help you?

