On June 29th a cloud burst occurred at Rackspace, proving that even the mighty eventually do fall. The blow-by-blow Rackspace Twitter account of their power outage provides interesting insight into what happens during a crisis at a hosting provider.
In every industry there are dirty little secrets that customers either don’t know about, or don’t want to know about. The meat counter at the grocery store is a prime example. Those steaks and chops look really good, but did you every watch the entire process from hoof to hamburger? It’s not pretty, and for most folks it’s Too Much Information.
So here’s Dirty Little Secret #1 of the hosting industry: While most every hosting company has to make the claim in order to be credible, no one can deliver 100% data center up time forever. No one. Not even the market leader. So why then make the claim at all? Because that’s what customers demand to hear. In talking with customers we find a widespread cross-industry sentiment, usually absent of any logical rational, that says “my business is so important that my infrastructure has to be running 24/7 without any interruptions at all.” Unless your business is keeping patients alive with sophisticated medical equipment, this seems like a rather difficult position to defend. But no one wants to be the bad guy to point that out. We know there is life beyond brief outages because they happen every day and yet nobody goes broke, but it is typically unwise to say so.
Realizing that downtime will occur, even in the elite shops of the world like Rackspace with their fleet of nine data centers, you do need to make realistic decisions about what level of up time you really need in light of the type of business you’re in. And while it may sound like heresy, you also want to make decisions about things that are much more important than up time levels. It seems to me that if downtime is inevitable, and we know that it is, then I want my equipment in the hands of people who know how to recover quickly from an outage, who will communicate with me regularly and truthfully throughout the crisis, and who will do their level best to get me back on line as quickly as possible. I want my equipment in the hands of highly competent people that I can trust. You can’t make that determination when you sign up for service via a web browser or where you do the whole transaction over the phone. The only way to make the determination is to actually meet the people who are going to become the custodians of your infrastructure.
Before you put your equipment in the hands of someone else, make the effort to visit them. If they don’t allow visits, that should be a big Red Flag #1. Talk to their operations and support people, particularly the folks who will be touching your equipment. If you’re not allowed to talk them, that should be Red Flag #2. Ask them about their up time guarantee. If they look at you square in the eye and say 100%, that should be Red Flag #3. Kick the dust out of your shoes and move on.
Let me cordially invite you to visit our data center hosting facility this summer. No red flags – just trustworthy, highly competent, and dependable people.
//spk
p.s. Happy 4th of July!
