

Wordpress Hosted Blogs are Down - jfornear
http://www.centernetworks.com/wordpress-hosted-blogs-are-down?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Centernetworks-+%28CenterNetworks+-%29&utm_content=Twitterhttp://www.centernetworks.com/wordpress-hosted-blogs-are-down

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jrockway
The big mass of PHP spaghetti has finally become self-aware -- and it killed
itself. And people say artificial intelligence isn't...

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stanley
Either that or it's secretly constructing Wordpress T-1000

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JacobAldridge
My lolcats. Nooooo!

(Sadly, I did discover the outage when I opened my morning read of Fail Blog /
Graph Jam / I can haz cheezeburger / Oddly Specific / Photobomb / WTF Pictures
/ Ugliest Tattoos / Failbooking. Does admitting that mean I'm no longer
qualified for HN?)

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MartinCron
For what it's worth, Oddly Specific didn't go down, as that's where we're
testing running Wordpress on the Windows Azure platform.

-Martin from Cheezburger

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JacobAldridge
I can confirm that actually - when I opened all the links, the others stalled
while Oddly Specific did load. Good to know why.

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benofsky
Wow, I'm surprised TechCrunch is included in this, you would think they have a
bit more of a redundant setup.

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pavs
Why would any website which gets few million hits a month not have a redundant
system is beyond me. If you consider the amount of money they make the cost of
a redundant setup is really nothing.

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icey
I was under the impression that people used Wordpress VIP hosting so that they
wouldn't have to worry about using a redundant system (meaning that Wordpress
VIP should take care of it).

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brk
You can't outsource your liability.

At a certain point (a point which TC passed quite a long time ago) you simply
have to own your own infrastructure. That does not make it bullet proof, but
it puts it under your own control and you can respond accordingly and better
control the outcome of any outage.

I know that in Web2.0 everybody wants to think that they can outsource all the
messy bits of running a website to the lowest bidder, but that approach has
never worked.

When you get REALLY big (like facebook and google big) you move from a self-
managed server in a carrier-neutral datacenter to building and maintaining
your own datacenters.

For some reason people think it's perfectly normal that facebook builds its
own datacenter, and yet also perfectly normal that a large blog (Techcrunch)
take no ownership of the very equipment that makes their site go.

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icey
Why would TC want to spend the money on a datacenter, staffing, bandwidth, etc
for their blog when there are services out there that will do all of that
stuff for them at a fraction of the cost? Private datacenters have outages as
well, they wouldn't have been immune from outages if they were hosted
internally. If anything, they are somewhat shielded from liability because
_everyone_ knew Wordpress was down.

It makes sense for Facebook and Google to build and own their own data centers
because they deal with volume on an hourly basis that is magnitudes larger
than TC probably sees in a week (or possibly even a month). Techcrunch is a
blog. That's it. That doesn't require owning your own datacenter. It requires
a hosting company that can keep the lights on. Wordpress is about as good as
you're going to get in that situation.

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brk
_Why would TC want to spend the money on a datacenter, staffing, bandwidth_

I don't think they should/would do that. They are nowhere near large enough in
traffic volume to justify that. But they SHOULD have more direct control over
the servers that run their blog so that WHEN something happens (again, I never
claimed that maintaining your own server made you immune) they can directly
control the outcome.

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compumike
Of course this happens just hours after we launch a new video and are getting
lots of traffic from hackaday.com (which is apparently WP hosted)...

<http://www.nerdkits.com/videos/digital_calipers_dro/>

So looking at our server logs now, we're largely seeing hits to that page from
Google Reader (I guess it cached their RSS feed?).

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stanleydrew
I think that's how Google Reader works, or at least I hope that's how it
works. They do the polling for the feed and then store it somewhere to serve
to anyone who's subscribed through Reader.

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dnsworks
This means that Techcrunch is down, and @arrington is gearing up for a nervous
breakdown after his 4th or 5th provider switch in 2 years.

Eventually I would think that they would belly up to the bar and implement a
redundancy solution that involves multiple solutions. Then again, I am an
infrastructure architect, not a blogger, what do I know?

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farrel
That... or maybe he'll just move it over to tumblr.

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terrellm
But if they take back or "steal" his subdomain the how will he blog about the
injustice?

