Looks like Sidekick users are having bad weather in their Clowd, which serves as a reminder that hosted services aren’t the magical sure-fire solution to avoiding infrastructure management.

We tend to assume that online facilities, especially those provided by large organizations are going to be reliable, trustworthy and better administered than a small-budget local solution. We expect redundant servers, storage, backups, probably even multi-homed networks.

“They’re still looking for a way to recover it, but they’re not giving users a lot of hope”

Normally, a critical server failure has a recovery plan - “tape time”. When everything fails, rebuild the servers, restore from tape and get the show back on the road. This takes time but the data comes back.

For a major carrier to have an outage with no solid recovery plan, which implies no disaster recovery solution such as an off-site replication target is a surprise - but should it be? These sort of hosted services are pitched as being cheap or free, so should user expectations be so high?

If you’re not paying for a level of service, how can one expect that service to hit the reliability level that you know you’d achieve running it in-house?

When we deploy, for example, an in-house mail solution, we will have (generally) as a minimum

1. Multiple MXes, including a secondary on a remote network
2. Regular backups
3. A restoration plan to make use of those backups

But when we outsource our mail to a third-party provider, unless they actually make a sales position of their infrastructure and preparedness, how do we know if they’ll survive a server failure? A faulted storage array with data corruption?

I think the lesson to be learned from this failure isn’t just for Sidekick users - it’s for everyone using hosted services in a manner in which would lead to a problem if they went away.

How much impact would the loss of email, calendaring, contact management and instant messaging have on your day?