Amazon S3 down all day
Sunday, July 20, 2008 by Dave Winer.
As you can see, we host most of our images on Amazon S3. As do many other sites. 
It's been a marvel of uptime, until it goes down. And today's outage is the worst so far (there have only been two others). I'm sure they're working their butts off to get it back on the air, but as probably a lot of others are doing today, I'm thinking of ways to avoid these outages in the future.
It seems there is a business opportunity here -- it would be easy to hook up an external service to S3, and for a fee, keep a mirror on another server. Then it would be a matter of redirecting domains to point at the other server when S3 goes down.
It would be a smart service to combine with a DNS service, or a registrar.
That solution would work for Scripting News, since all the images are hosted on Amazon through an alias called images.scripting.com. That could easily be pointed to a different server that hosts a mirror. Of course that will have to wait until Amazon comes back. 
Update 6:30PM: S3 is working again.
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Dave Winer, 53, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in Berkeley, California.
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