I can recommend trying AppHarbor - we're striving to deliver a better .NET and Windows cloud platform. Feel free to shoot me an email (rs@appharbor.com) if there's anything I can help with.
good luck changing your email address ;)
Our service is down because Msft Azure is down. This is how we chose to react.
51–60 of 67 posts
Re: Our service is down because Msft Azure is down. This is how we chose to react.
#52My impression of that page was not very good TBH. The words are kind, but for me at least, the message boiled down to:
"We're down." "It isn't our fault." "We'll be back up when someone else gets it fixed."
You must be at least _thinking_ about how to avoid/limit this impact in the future. Why not give the user more information along these lines, and thereby position yourself as an active participant in the process at the same time? Polite helplessness is probably not what you want to project as a business, but that is what I took away from it.
Re: Our service is down because Msft Azure is down. This is how we chose to react.
#53When can we move beyond blaming a cloud service and just owning up to the decision? Soluto chose to use Azure and knew they were taking a risk. It's their fault for choosing to use Azure, and unless they signed for a 100.000000000% uptime guarantee (which I'm sure they didn't, given no one would give such a guarantee) they have to own up to any faults. This extends to those services that blames AWS as well. It's not…
Azure offers a SLA with a 99,95% uptime guarantee for computing instances and a 99,9% uptime SLA for storage. If they do not meet this SLA you will get your money back. You can read more about it at www.windowsazure.com/en-us/support/legal/sla/
They've already blown that SLA - for the year. Now how much of my money do I get back?
Re: Our service is down because Msft Azure is down. This is how we chose to react.
#54Re: Our service is down because Msft Azure is down. This is how we chose to react.
#55One of the FAQ answers on the page linked to by the "More information..." link on their outage page states, "Cloud services like ourselves someone (sic) experience such outages, it's part of the modern web."
I can't believe that it actually says that. It seems extremely unprofessional to me to make a statement like that.
Downtime like this is not acceptable, regardless how the service is hosted, and who is providing the hosting.
We didn't put up with this kind of outage with the "old fashioned" Web, and we shouldn't put up with it from the so-called "modern" Web, either.
Re: Our service is down because Msft Azure is down. This is how we chose to react.
#56This is a nice gesture, but I prefer the services I use to take responsibility for their provider and technology choices. Your customers don't care that Azure is down, they only care that they can't do whatever they were trying to accomplish. This isn't Azure's fault. It's yours. Don't pass the buck.
And if all they said was they were experiencing difficulties you'd see people complaining that they aren't giving any indication as to what the problem is. The site is down because their provider is down. This is, as someone else stated, a fact. They told you that and that is really all they can do. They have to wait just the same as you do, for the same thing. > This isn't Azure's fault. Yes it is. The alternative i…
It's a myth that dedicated hosting in several geographically distant data centers really costs that much more than cloud computing. With a little bit of care, it's quite easy to get very good value from such hosting, with far more control over it. Outages like this could be easily avoided, or at the very least dealt with much quicker.
It would not be the "end of a great many small to medium companies" were they to use dedicated hosting. Hell, this is how it was commonly done up until the past 2 to 3 years, and small and medium companies thrived quite well.
In fact, after the cloud outages of the past week, and a few other recent outages, more traditional dedicated hosting keeps on looking better and better.
Re: Our service is down because Msft Azure is down. This is how we chose to react.
#57This is a nice gesture, but I prefer the services I use to take responsibility for their provider and technology choices. Your customers don't care that Azure is down, they only care that they can't do whatever they were trying to accomplish. This isn't Azure's fault. It's yours. Don't pass the buck.
They're not passing the buck, they're voicing their unhappiness. It's important that this happens, because it damages the reputation of cloud providers that go down a lot (like AWS' US-EAST). Being down for 24 hours is pretty impressive, in a bad way.
There's a time and a place for voicing such displeasure. When your website and service is unavailable, it is not the time, and your maintenance page is not the place.
Re: Our service is down because Msft Azure is down. This is how we chose to react.
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Our service is down because Azure is down" definitely sounds like scapegoating (regardless of whether it is the case, Soluto should have a contingency plan)
That's not scapegoating, it's pointing at facts. Sad as they are. When you have a complex web service, you rely on a provider. That provider can go down sometimes, and it takes you with it. Again I'll point to Netflix and AWS, they waited until AWS were back up, they didn't "restore a backup" somewhere else.
It wouldn't be scapegoating if their site was still up and their service still functioning, hosted by some alternate provider, for example. But since their site and service aren't up, I think it can be seen as scapegoating.
Re: Our service is down because Msft Azure is down. This is how we chose to react.
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its just too expensive, you cant host your custom domain name on free instance. And there's nothing between 0 and 50$. I'm waiting for prices of azure web sites, hopefully it would compare to shared hosting prices.
You can add custom hostnames to the free instance for $10/month
Can you explain to us why such basic functionality is so expensive?
Is there a legitimate technical reason for the cost, for example? Or is it subsidizing some other service? Or is it that high just because some people are foolish enough to pay that much for it?
Re: Our service is down because Msft Azure is down. This is how we chose to react.
#60I didn't know what Soluto was, so I went on your main page to find out what it was while your service was down. All I saw was "Service Disruption :( We are experiencing problems with our cloud infrastructure More information..." Nothing else to click on but that one link for support. So when I clicked on it, still didn't know what it was and so I scrolled all the way down and clicked "About" then yet again I was gree…
That's right. It's double-bad when things like that happen during the weekend so time-to-reaction is slower. All will be better tomorrow.
Are you trying to tell us that proper automated failover systems take the weekends off?