“Unforgivable?”
WordPress.com “major drive failure”:
This is unforgivable. No matter how small a hosting organisation you are (and WordPress.com couldn’t be considered small), your users data is sacrosanct. Users will tolerate occasional downtime but not loss of data.
If you use computers, and you think your data is safe anywhere, you’re confused.
If you think paying a few dollars a month buys you data security on par with God, you’re confused.
If you think weblog content on a $3/month plan is sacrosanct, you’re confused. In fact, I can’t even figure out how much it costs to have a weblog hosted at WordPress.com.
The reason Tom has this backwards is because it is very expensive, in time and equipment, to provide the kind of bulletproof data recovery he is talking about (more details follow later in his post). To be specific, he talks about having separate drive containers/arrays for content, one for the system itself, and one for transaction logs. Well, to be really secure, we also need:
- A redundant set of backups on a second (geographically disparate) site, also with separate storage spaces for OS and backups.
- Integrity checks of all backups at all times; not just CRC, but making sure that all the content that should be backed up, is.
- Someone to administer all of this.
Any monkey can set up a Linux box and put it on the ‘net. Setting up a Linux box, making it easy to maintain (more-so than a bog-standard Debian install is), secure, and robust in the face of failure is another thing entirely. Now that I’m co-daddy of a new, 1U server (as opposed to a small virtual machine), I’m coming to see that making the machine robust in the face of every possible failure is simply not likely, given the time available.
For what Tom wants, I’d expect someone to be paying at least $80-100 US/month to be guaranteed nothing will go south. Less than that, and data loss should be a possibility that is just part of life. Of course, Tom is mostly writing about customer perceptions and reputation, but the expectations of users often far outweigh what they are paying for the service. Essentially, in a world where Gmail is free, how can you compete?