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Ask HN: What can one do to protect against hosting failures?

6 points by chime ↗ HN
Right now AWS is having issues and I keep seeing arguments like "And that's why you don't put all your eggs in one basket." Day before yesterday MediaTemple's name-servers went down and many of my sites became unreachable. So what am I as a developer really supposed to do?

It's trivial to disable add-ons/APIs that add features to your site like Disqus but is there anything you can do if your host goes down or has networking issues? Is there a proper way to deploy data-driven sites to EC2, Rackspace, and MediaTemple so that it never goes down? I have yet to see an affordable host with 100% uptime.

I can understanding Microsoft, Apple, or Facebook having multiple data-centers for fail-over but what should small-shops do?

2 comments

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patio11
Apologize for the inconvenience if circumstances beyond your control bring down your website, just like you would in the much more common scenario that circumstances totally under your control bring down your website.
rmc
Don't have any single point of failure. Duplicate things."Don't put all your eggs in one basket" means "Put your eggs in many baskets". You could pay for 2 lots of hosting with 2 different companies. You could regularly try deploying your system to different hosting companies to test that you can minimize downtime.

However for some activities (eg Facebook application) you are unable to change that are.