By Lou Honick
Outages and data breaches, based on Amazon and Sony Playstation Network, are the topic of the day, and to a lesser extent, things like the Media Temple DNS outage. Things like this are always making news. Rackspace has had some high profile datacenter issues, The Planet had a datacenter explosion, Gmail goes down from time to time, high profile sites like Mastercard got hit with a massive DDOS, and popular electronics accessory site Monoprice had a serious data breach. And those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. The fact is that these things happen. Why do people not want to admit this? I think web hosts share a good portion of the blame for this perception. In a competitive industry, with everyone looking to get an edge, the ante has been upped as far as it can go - a pledge of 100% uptime. In credit card processing I talk about the race to the bottom where everyone can beat anyone else's price by a few basis points until we are basically giving the service away at Interchange (Visa/Mastercard cost). In hosting, it's a race to the top, where the race ended a long time ago and everyone is forced to promise the impossible. It's cutthroat and despicable, when I post an article about the Amazon outage and I get a web host posting an advertisement in the comments saying "Try us if you are unhappy with the Amazon downtime." Really? Do you honestly think you'll never have an outage? Do you think you're more reliable than Amazon and their billions in resources? Even if you manage to steal customers away using this tactic, and web hosts have been doing it as long as I can remember, it is an awfully flimsy house of cards you are building. What are those customers going to think when it is your turn to pay the piper? And don't kid yourself, your day is coming. You might not make the Wall Street Journal with news of your outage, but it will happen and it is going to be painful. Trust me, I know, I was part of PLENTY of painful outages at HostMySite.com. It was a big driver in my decision to sell the company. At some point you worry that the next big incident will be it. Will be the end. Because even though it won't be, the immense drive for the impossible takes its toll on you. Not only will your customers be upset, but your competitors will descend on you like vultures. DDOS attacks, fiber cuts, data breaches, hacked servers, transformer failures, generator fiascos, HVAC problems, been there, done that. And if you're in the hosting industry, odds are you've been through it too and tried to keep a lid on as much of it as possible.
So what's the point of my post here? We need to get realistic. As customers. As web hosts. As users of websites and online services. Things happen, sites go down. Our lives are better for having these services, and not much worse off by being without them for a few hours or days. Life and business go on. We need to take responsibility when it comes to sharing our personal information, and take care to only share what is necessary. Furthermore, we need to demand that websites we use only ask for what is absolutely necessary, and we need to have a plan in place to safeguard ourselves for the time WHEN that data is breached. If you choose to put your information out there, your assumption should be it's going to really get out there. I'm not blaming the users of Amazon EC2 for not building their apps correctly, and I'm not blaming Amazon for a relatively unforeseeable calamity. It is a shared responsibility, and furthermore that responsibility flows downstream to the affected users who need to understand that this is a fact of life and move on. Can things get better? Sure. Do we already have an insanely great, awesomely reliable Internet infrastructure available to us from a plethora of excellent providers? Absolutely. Communicate, fix, learn, improve, and then just move on. The great thing is that time does generally heal all wounds.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/thewhir_blogs/~3/Mi9vOskgXLE/042711_The_truth_about_outages_data_breaches_and_other_disasters
ddosed ddosed on runescape ddosed rs ddosed runescape ddoser
Matrix Partners, a US-based investment firm with additional offices in India and China, this morning announced that it has closed two new funds: Matrix Partners China II (at $350 million) and Matrix Partners India II (at $300 million). The funds bring the firm's total international assets under management to $650 million in China and $600 million in India. Matrix Partners established an India presence back in 2006 and has an experienced entrepreneur running its investment team there: Avnish Bajaj, co-founder and former CEO of India's largest online marketplace Baazee.com (acquired by eBay). The firm has been active in China since 2008.
Editor?s Note: This is a guest post by Mark Suster (
Just to add more fuel to the 
Two days ago, we removed the Google Buzz button from the top and bottom of each post on TechCrunch. No one noticed. Not a single person said a word about it. It wasn't until earlier today when 
