linode

When a power failure at the Hurricane Electric data center took this website down for five hours earlier this year, I looked up the Linode service level agreement (SLA) I accepted, and found that I probably made a good cost/benefit choice, but even so it’s worth revisiting at some point.
Upgrading to a platform with significantly higher reliability could be costly though. It means I have to find a hosting company that uses data centers and other infrastructure with a better SLA than Linode apparently has with Hurricane.… More

Hey, maybe no one will notice that it broke?

It was no black swan event that brought down a big chunk of Hurricane Electric’s data center #2 in Fremont last weekend. Instead, it was an easily foreseeable malfunction that should have been taken into account when the center was designed. According to a postmortem report posted by Linode – the company primarily affected by the outage – when PG&E’s line went out at the facility, a bad battery kept backup power from kicking in…

Seven of the facility’s eight generators started correctly and provided uninterrupted power.

Hurricane Electric should have been prepared for this.

I’ve been reading, negotiating and occasionally writing service level agreements (SLAs) for many years. It’s an abstract exercise – so many nines for so much money. That’s until until something happens and you have to figure out whether 1. you stupidly hand waved the whole thing hoping that nothing would happen, 2. the calculated risk you took was worth it, or 3. you got screwed by your service provider.… More