Recession reliability of the cloud
We’re all becoming more dependent on free websites: for storing photos, webmail, social networking, blogging, calendars, contacts, notes, sync, everything. But as the downturn shifts towards a recession more of these free sites will be at risk of sudden closure if last time is any indication.
Today, logging in to wordpress I was struck by the shrewd opportunistic net thrown towards livejournal users as wordpress promoted ease of import with a tagline on the wordpress dashboard. Livejournal has apparently just laid off a large part of its staff and is moving more of its operations to Russia…
I’m pondering how to have early warning of the risk to avoid last minute panics to back up content, or, sites folding during a two week holiday so I miss the chance to retrieve my stuff. Yes, I could spend time researching the viability of every firm that runs a service that I’m using, but it takes time and the reason to use most of these sites is time-saving and convenience. Anyone feel like starting a ‘failing firm watch’ website? I’m thinking a community effort could cover the ground much more effectively.
Perhaps it’s time to focus more on self-hosting and remote access to my home network, rather than leaving stuff in the cloud on someone else’s kit.
Well, this is why I run my own stuff. Obviously this isn’t an avenue open to everyone, but for me it’s much better and more convenient simply to have root on a permanently-connected box – and therefore to be able to do my own software installations, backups, and everything else – than to trust someone else to do it for the advertising revenue (which is, thank heavens, collapsing fast).
You get what you pay for (in money, time, or whatever else).
Firedrake
January 15, 2009 at 9:28 am
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Recession resilience of individual cloud services « Being Connected by Ian Fogg
January 15, 2009 at 10:58 am
Cloud reliability is something I worry about.
I think the key is to use open standards and ensure you have an exit strategy – for example I try to keep critical stuff on a “cloud” linux machine for which I maintain backups – I know if that service provider goes away, I can switch to another with only moderate pain and no loss of data.
The other alternative is to only use cloud services for “toy” purposes – I have a few little things stored in google docs, for example, which are handy but I don’t really care if I lose.
Of course, “toy” stuff has a habit of becoming critical when you’re not looking…
Michael Stevens
January 15, 2009 at 5:35 pm