A bunch of major sites have been hit by a power outage at their San Fran data center and it made me wonder what web-services I’d be OK without for a few hours. Thankfully all of the sites hit in this case are useful but not necessary. Had I been a LiveJournal, Vox or TypePad user I would be inconvenienced but not too put out. If I made a living off blogging though and it was hosted on TypePad I think I would be hurting.
At this late hour I can really only think of GMail and FeedBurner as being the sites that would hurt me if they went down. Though thankfully I’ve long used a redirect for FeedBurner so anyone subscribed to my various feeds can be switched back to the source and not routed through Feedburner. I’d loose some stats and a few nifty features for a few hours but I could live with that. With GMail I’d loose some emails but I’m assuming, maybe wrongly, that GMail doesn’t live in one datacenter and any system sending me email should retry a few times over expanding hours until the service comes back up.
If my site’s hosting went down then there wouldn’t be much I could do but it isn’t critical. You just wouldn’t be able to read my verbage for a few hours. Loosing Flickr for a few hours wouldn’t hurt and Twitter, heck, that could have been down for the past two days for all the times I’ve used it.
I would miss the Google Talk service but I’ve got a few other IMs and email logins spread around for rainy days. I read all my feeds through my own service, Millifeed, and thanks to our sysadmin and soon to be distributed hosting one datacenter collapse should only slow the service down a bit.
I’d probably really miss the daily Dilbert and Calvin & Hobbes cartoons though. That would be something you’d want distributed.
How about you? Do you use the web for a lot of services and how would you cope if a few of them went down for a few hours?
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