Cloud computing

[Angrboda]

Chances of a cloud hosting provider like AWS going down en mass?

Right. Pretty much everyone in the business of selling cloud storage services is reselling for AWS or another provider. With that being said, I'm still backing up what I've got stored in the cloud - I'm paranoid about data loss.

It doesn't matter who they are reselling for, they are still brokering the service, and in the absence of that service, the existence of your data "somewhere" is irrelevant. That my data still exists on some server somewhere is no comfort to me when all my links go dead. And there are zillions of cloud providers out there: dropbox, sugarsynch, the plethora of picture hosts from flickr to imageshack — if any of these companies go tits up, any links you've shared to that data become invalid. (Not to mention, anybody that's been in this business a long time knows that companies get sold, taken over, or abandoned, all the fucking time. If Amazon has to choose between retaining an unprofitable division (say AWS) and divesting it to concentrate on more profitable ventures, they're gone. [Google wave, anybody?] Hell, IBM's hard disk division was at the top of its game when they sold to Hitachi. And my ISP (one of them), was a world leader throughout the first 10-15 years of its career, and a major hub of all data traffic into and out of the state. First, a national bought them out, and then an international. The first was just pathetic; the second is so sleazy they leech off other providers by simply refusing to make peerage agreements — whether your pipe exists tomorrow or not is a big unknown. [And because they've taken over the ISP that was the major hub for data traffic in this part of the country, I suspect the reliability and robustness of all providers in the area is critically affected, as I'm sure they're still using the same infrastructure. At least, that's my suspicion.])

Shit, this is bringing up bad memories.


ETA:

I actually bought two pogoplus devices last month. One I can convert to a stand-alone web server. The other uses local storage in the form of flash or external drives, and makes their contents web accessible via their custom applications and servers. If I've got my photo collection hosted on there (not that I would), and they go under, that means the references to any of that content that I've shared are no longer accessible (and with probably 50,000-100,000 photos, if I exposed whole collections of photos to other content consumers, whole directories of content would just "virtually disappear" overnight).