Today one of the major Italian hosting company had a down of 4/6 hours. This’s not a news, even Google and Amazon experienced some problems in the past. The news is that there were a fire (caused by some UPS) on their unique data center serving all their customers and even themselves!

In order to communicate with the customers, they have setup a twitter account (http://twitter.com/#!/Arubait) that in one day has more than 6k followers.

My first thought is that (as @Felter said on his tweet) burning your server farm and setup a new twitter account to get 6k followers in a day is not a bad idea .

After a little I feel a bit frustrated of all the time spent on customers trying to make them spend a little more on a hosting platform that is reliable and have some sort of SLA instead of watching only the money. All customers blaming Aruba for what happened must instead blame themselves. They know that Aruba offer a cheap hosting with almost no SLA, but they are so convenient….

In my opinion, entrust a company that didn’t replicate even DNS servers on multiple datacenter is simply not an option for your business. How much time/money can you afford to lose for a down on your IT infrastructure? Is the money saved worth the risks taken?

In 2011 I think that cloud solutions, I mean any cloud solutions (Amazon, Rackspace etc), are better than this kind of hosting. They costs a little more but have SLA! And most important all data is replicated across more than one datacenter. An UPS battery causing a fire is their business, not mine!

So the real question is: how much are you ready to pay to ensure that your business doesn’t depend on a overheating Chinese UPS?

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