It's exceptionally easy to engineer around these issues if you don't just outsource all of your thinking to a provider.
Can we stop blaming internet companies for outsourcing certain responsibilities? A decent hosting provider should ensure there isn't a single point of failure in their service. You don't ask a random company to set up their own accountancy department either: there are specialized companies to which you can outsource that. They bear the responsibility for faulty reports, as Rackspace bears the responsibility for not having a decent failover setup.
As a specialist of some sort, you have better things to do than to think about what is needed for a proper failover setup. Especially because you will still miss certain subtle details, because you are not an expert in handling a datacentre failure. You should hire experts to set that up for you and a hosting provider has those experts.
Honest to God, what's with this attitude of 'if something on the internet fails, it's your own fault, because we are all smart enough to take care of all those contingencies'?
1: we aren't; failover handling is prone to subtle bugs. What tptacek keeps saying about security also holds for contingency handling.
2: it's not smart to spend your time bothering with intricate, but ultimately mundane, issues that can be outsourced.
Can we stop blaming internet companies for outsourcing certain responsibilities? A decent hosting provider should ensure there isn't a single point of failure in their service. You don't ask a random company to set up their own accountancy department either: there are specialized companies to which you can outsource that. They bear the responsibility for faulty reports, as Rackspace bears the responsibility for not having a decent failover setup.
As a specialist of some sort, you have better things to do than to think about what is needed for a proper failover setup. Especially because you will still miss certain subtle details, because you are not an expert in handling a datacentre failure. You should hire experts to set that up for you and a hosting provider has those experts.
Honest to God, what's with this attitude of 'if something on the internet fails, it's your own fault, because we are all smart enough to take care of all those contingencies'?
1: we aren't; failover handling is prone to subtle bugs. What tptacek keeps saying about security also holds for contingency handling.
2: it's not smart to spend your time bothering with intricate, but ultimately mundane, issues that can be outsourced.