There are times when your website must be taken down for routine maintenance or, in the event of a catastrophic failure of all your servers, must be restored from backup. In either event, a maintenance page is necessary to inform your customers of the reason the site is down and when you expect it to […]
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket, they say. You should always have a plan B. Companies spend millions on their data connections, but even the best of them can fail. And what happens when you don’t have adequate backup systems in place? Well, take a look at our survey of outages in 2018 […]
Despite whatever bad news you read in this article, we encourage you to remain positive. It’s just human nature to have a curious interest in the calamities of others. So if that’s what gives you your kicks, feel free to enjoy our 2nd annual dispatch on some of the most interesting outages of the past […]
Recently we discussed the heavy cost of ransomware, both in the form astronomical ransoms that have been paid recently as well as the cost of dealing with the aftermath of an attack. When it comes to most serious cyberattacks, a pound of prevention is worth a pound of cure. The truth is that in most […]
Just when you think things are getting safer on the web, somebody comes up with a startling claim and spoils your party: “Our analysis paints a somewhat bleak situation on the state of modern web ecosystem.” That’s the conclusion of a 2016 study conducted by Carnegie Mellon University. The full title is worth noting: Oh, […]
We have remarked several times in this space about the tremendous changes in the data center in such a short period of time. Not only are device footprints shrinking and functionalities converging, but the way that hardware and software are managed has become more comprehensive and streamlined. Now the same thing that has happening to […]
On an Air Force base in San Antonio, Texas, two men walk into the base exchange. They show their IDs to the clerks, don Halloween masks, and proceed to play the part of terrorists. “This is a drill! We want liberation! This is only a drill!” Airmen shopping in the facility give them funny looks, […]
Alright, we admit that our company has a certain obsession with network availability we collectively call “uptime”. It’s even in our name. We’re totally committed to keeping services up and running for our clients. And while uptime is our best friend, we seem to spend a lot of time thinking about the enemy: downtime. We’ve […]
After unabashedly extolling the virtues of redundancy in a recent article , you may be wondering why we would follow up with another post questioning whether sometimes too much (redundancy) was just too much. Credit fellow staffers for the suggestion that we revisit the issue. The problem was clearly a part of our initial research, and it deserves […]
Controlling traffic is a key facet of internet management. Sometimes primary connections will go down. Or too much traffic may cause congested links or overwhelmed devices to become unusable. We wrote about the implementation of load balancing in the cloud in a 2017 blog post. When people think of load balancing, they usually think about traffic that […]