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Amazon S3 down all day

Sunday, July 20, 2008 by Dave Winer.

Joker!As you can see, we host most of our images on Amazon S3. As do many other sites.  Permalink to this paragraph

It's been a marvel of uptime, until it goes down. And today's outage is the worst so far (there have only been two others). I'm sure they're working their butts off to get it back on the air, but as probably a lot of others are doing today, I'm thinking of ways to avoid these outages in the future. Permalink to this paragraph

It seems there is a business opportunity here -- it would be easy to hook up an external service to S3, and for a fee, keep a mirror on another server. Then it would be a matter of redirecting domains to point at the other server when S3 goes down.  Permalink to this paragraph

It would be a smart service to combine with a DNS service, or a registrar. Permalink to this paragraph

That solution would work for Scripting News, since all the images are hosted on Amazon through an alias called images.scripting.com. That could easily be pointed to a different server that hosts a mirror. Of course that will have to wait until Amazon comes back. ;-> Permalink to this paragraph

Update 6:30PM: S3 is working again.  Permalink to this paragraph

A picture named cartoon.gif Permalink to this paragraph




     

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A picture named dave.jpgDave Winer, 53, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in Berkeley, California.

"The protoblogger." - NY Times.

"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.

One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.

"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.

"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.

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Last update: 10/20/2008; 8:22:33 AM Pacific. "It's even worse than it appears."

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