Via Cbowns on Flickr
Amazon acknowledged that its Virginia-based data center was in the path of Hurricane Irene, which could cause potential outages for several high-profile websites.
Geekwire discovered an Amazon representative’s reply in the AWS forums addressing concerned clients who had data stored in the Northern Virginia data center.
The representative said the company was monitoring the hurricane and making all possible preparations, including generator fuel, food/water, flashlights, radios and extra staff.
The representative also recommended checking out the AWS Architecture Center, which offers several tips on how to build highly scalable and reliable applications in the AWS cloud.
This same Virginia-based data center failed in April 2011, knocking many big websites like Reddit, Quora, and Foursquare offline.
When that happened, we interviewed Adam Ely, director of security at TiVo, and he offered some valuable suggestions to help minimize the impact in disaster events.
Ely recommended that companies prepare for disaster by hosting their websites in multiple data centers across the United States.
With Irene bearing down on Amazon’s Virginia center, the reasoning behind his recommendation becomes crystal clear. Spreading your hosting needs over Amazon’s centers in California, Virginia, and Ireland would minimize impact in this scenario. Going beyond that, you could even opt to differentiate your providers: like hosting 10 servers with RackSpace and 10 with Amazon.
Ely did point out one drawback with the multiple-hosting locations: cost. You will pay more to host in various data centers.
