When a company’s website goes down, IT staff rush to resolve the issue and try to get to its root cause. This is easier said than done, considering the hosting options available in today’s Internet-market. You can host services internally, use online providers, or use a combination of options that help dynamically load balance traffic workload. A provider of such services, Cloudflare, experienced an incident just earlier today.
In fact, earlier this morning WatchGuard’s website was down as a result. We were just one of many affected services, but Cloudflare promptly resolved the issue in about 20 minutes. Here’s some chatter on Twitter revolving around this topic.
Internally hosting services allows direct access to systems and local troubleshooting. This also entails ensuring maximum uptime in-house as well. This isn’t always feasible considering staffing requirements and associated skill sets, amongst many other factors, making online hosting more favorable. These hosting providers do what they must to offer maximum uptimes, often themselves allowing service integration with companies like Cloudflare. For instance, AWS offers a similar product (CloudFront) to Cloudflare but obliviously with differences; compare the two here. But the option is up to you as a consumer, do you want to host your site on AWS and use CloudFront or do you want to integrate with Cloudflare?
As beneficial as these services are, considering the protection offered, if something happens to them directly, as did Cloudflare earlier, the Internet can be widely affected. In 2017, AWS went down before too and caused a large outage. There are other options, like locally hosting services and not relying on these services but this can open a whole new can of worms.
Everyone sitting at a PC, just needs to take a breath… ISPs and ASPs are NOT infallible.. As the proverbial saying goes; SH&% Happens…. Most service providers do the absolute best they can to respond to complaints; the world is not going to burn down because a website is not available for 30 minutes; now if that issues becomes a chronic problem that without cause continues; and the provider does the only thing they can do; issue an apology and a adjustment for non-availability; if the problem is severe enough; most companies have service interruption insurance… Just sayin…
With the advent of todays “connected environment” most users should be understanding of a random service outage… Its a fact of life; we all do the best we can; but some things are just absolutely out of your control… Cloudflare is subject to the same internet use case everyone else uses…
Take a minute during the outage and realize exactly what it is, or is not… Life will go on and your website will come back up… Take 5 and actually interact with your friends and colleagues… Its amazing what may happen when we take time to actually have a non-PC dialogue…
That is a great perspective to add! Thank you for sharing this fact, and thanks for reading and engaging with this post!
I agree, there is more to life outside of technology and involved uses. Further, I agree that just because a company is a company with employees, this doesn’t mean they won’t and don’t face the same issues other companies or independent folks face. They still have hurdles that come up, servers fail and network traffic halts – it’s just a matter of getting services back up as soon as possible.
As one who still enjoys physical books, sure it’s nice to digitally have instant access to many things but I do my best to minimize technological uses and engage in the world around me. Hearing birds chirping and feeling the wind blowing is far more energizing than watching it on a screen. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy gaming from time to time – of course with friends at that 😉