<story><title>&quot;Amazon EBS sucks. I just lost all my data&quot;</title><url>http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?threadID=46277</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>brk</author><text>Although I sometimes get downvoted for this, I&apos;ll say it again:&lt;p&gt;You can&apos;t outsource your liability.&lt;p&gt;If your product is a webapp, then the underlying messy bits of backups, hardware, availability and redundancy also require some amount of conscious thought on your part. Not every site/app needs it&apos;s own mini-datacenter, and you might not even need your own dedicated server (though you probably do when you reach a certain minimal amount of scale). But you DO need to have someone who is thinking about backups and availability, and a valid solution is not to assume that the smart folks at Amazon or Rackspace or any other hosting provider are going to be completely and consistently working with your best interests and uptime in mind.&lt;p&gt;EVRYTHING fails at some point. Every server, every generator, every upstream connection, every hosting provider big or small. And in this case I mean fail as in goes dark for some period of time not covered by backups or hot-spares.&lt;p&gt;So, plan accordingly.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>patio11</author><text>&lt;i&gt;You can&apos;t outsource your liability.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Of course you can.  That is the entire reason the insurance industry exists.&lt;p&gt;More practically for the instant case, I use a provider who has a turnkey backup option, rather than one which would force me to spend expensive engineer time rolling my own only to discover that I really suck at thinking through all of the design challenges of backup solutions.  (Something which always seems to get discovered that the most &lt;i&gt;inconvenient&lt;/i&gt; of times.)</text></comment>
<story><title>&quot;Amazon EBS sucks. I just lost all my data&quot;</title><url>http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?threadID=46277</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>brk</author><text>Although I sometimes get downvoted for this, I&apos;ll say it again:&lt;p&gt;You can&apos;t outsource your liability.&lt;p&gt;If your product is a webapp, then the underlying messy bits of backups, hardware, availability and redundancy also require some amount of conscious thought on your part. Not every site/app needs it&apos;s own mini-datacenter, and you might not even need your own dedicated server (though you probably do when you reach a certain minimal amount of scale). But you DO need to have someone who is thinking about backups and availability, and a valid solution is not to assume that the smart folks at Amazon or Rackspace or any other hosting provider are going to be completely and consistently working with your best interests and uptime in mind.&lt;p&gt;EVRYTHING fails at some point. Every server, every generator, every upstream connection, every hosting provider big or small. And in this case I mean fail as in goes dark for some period of time not covered by backups or hot-spares.&lt;p&gt;So, plan accordingly.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>andrewvc</author><text>That&apos;s true, I agree 100%.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;d add to that though, if you&apos;re a small company sometimes you must recognize that a larger 3rd party can use scale to provide a more reliable service than you can.</text></comment>