Client: Our website went down for two hours yesterday! What are you doing to ensure that this never happens again!?!
Hmmm, well, how about nothing?
If you own a website, sooner or later it’s going to go down. It’s the nature of the beast. I mean Amazon went down for a full 11 hours last year, and some of their cloud services were down for three days. If Amazon can’t run their website with 100% reliability, how the hell do you expect us to?
It’s not like we play with server cables for entertainment’s sake. We didn’t sit down yesterday morning and say “Hey, you know what would be funny? Taking down a bunch of websites for two hours!”. Our severs aren’t sitting in a cupboard, prey to custodial staff who disconnect them to plug in their vacuum cleaner, or in a leaky attic where rats and possums can nest in the cases. Our systems are secured with all the industry standard protection and backup systems to prevent outages. Despite this, outages will sometimes occur. If you can’t understand that, you shouldn’t be operating a website. And if you think that there’s some other company out there who’ll keep your website online 100% of the time guaranteed, please feel free to go looking for them.
(And if you find them, please take a look at how much they charge you compared to us)
But hey, I’ll tell you what. If you pay us 48 billion dollars a year we’ll guarantee to be as reliable as Amazon. This means we promise that your site won’t be offline for more than an additional nine hours this year.
How’s that for a deal?
