It has just come to my attention that a local company in the hosting business has suffered a serious outage. I'm certain that this issue has caused some concern for our customers, causing them to wonder if maybe not supporting a local business and moving to one of the big hosting companies is a safer option.
I'm here to tell you that your sites are safe with us. Here's why:
We don't run our own data centre. Unless you're located in a major urban centre, it's difficult and expensive to establish "peering relationships" with the major backbone providers. This is why our servers are near a major network exchange. When a carrier has an issue (like Rogers did earlier this year) our data centre simply switches to routing traffic through another backbone.
Running a Data Centre is a different business. The capital required to run a top tier data centre is well beyond our means. It's one thing to have a backup power generator, but as this local provider has just discovered, every system can fail and you need two. You need two of everything. To be able to pay for that kind of redundancy you need to be big. If we did it right, there's no way we could be competitive.
We have offsite backups. Even with fully redundant systems, catastrophic data centre failures happen. Several years ago, there was an explosion at a big US data centre (ironically, one of their backup power systems blew up, taking out the second backup). Thousands of servers were blown apart, totally lost. This can happen to us too. Except we do daily offsite backups and they are stored on servers in a different continent. If our current data centre goes offline, we'll provision servers in a different location and restore all of our customers in short order.
