Friday, May 13, 2011

Live by the cloud, die by the cloud

Well, it looks like Blogger is back now, minus all of yesterday's posts.  Google had a major "oopsie" with the Blogger service:
Google's Blogger team says the service will be back to normal soon, after an outage that has so far lasted for almost two days.

The outage appears to have followed a maintenance release that was scheduled for Wednesday at 10pm, Pacific Daylight Time (PDT). To fix the problem, the team had to temporarily take down all new posts and comments made on the popular blogging platform since early on Wednesday, the team wrote on the Blogger status page on Friday.
I have to confess that my first thought was that they'd been hacked, like Sony and Playstation Network.  Instead, a maintenance upgrade broke the system.

Some folks seem a little upset, like the guy quoted in the ZDNet article:
The downtime has caused outrage among many people who use Blogger to host their output, such as NoSoftwarePatents campaign founder Florian Mueller, who took a swipe at Sergey Brin's recent criticism of Microsoft.

"Google's Brin says Windows tortures users," Mueller tweeted on Friday. "I'm actually being tortured by Google's Blogger service: massive outage also affects my last post."
Me, I'm not particularly exercised.  Sure, I could get my own server, install (probably) Wordpress, get a DNS name and Internet pipe, and keep up on patches by myself.  It would be a lot of work, and quite frankly, I doubt that I'd do as good a job as Blogger's service does.

And so I'm happy to use their "in the cloud" blog software, even with the occasional glitch like this.

But it's good that things are back.

UPDATE 14 May 2011 11:44: It's an ill wind that blows no good.  Heh.

9 comments:

  1. As I see it, Blogspot is free, so people shouldn't really complain so much.

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  2. I started on Blogspot; and after being taken down one time too many went to Wordpress, and finally to a contract server.

    The cost is far less than the cost of a server over its lifetime, and Wordpress pretty much provides updates as needed. It's not free - but I can add a few links without being shut down for a week or two.

    Since it is not a financial drain, I prefer it that way.

    Stranger

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  3. Stranger -

    And word press never has any problems?

    Hmmm...
    Josh

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  4. Hell, I HAVE all that stuff, and I still use blogger.

    Two reasons:

    1. broken links in five years worth of posts, plus google rankings, plus indexes etc... etc...

    2. You can't ddos Google

    Of course, that does leave me at googles mercy for shit like this, or being labeled as having objectionable content, or spam etc... etc... but one post like "team infidel" and the advantages vastly overwhelm the disadvantages.

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  5. Joshkie, as "self hosted," with multiple blogs, I have not had problems with Wordpress itself.

    But the Alley's host lost a server in the two years I have been over there. A different host has had 100% uptime, but that is a different blog. None of them have locked me out of a blog for two weeks without an apology.

    Stranger

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  6. Stranger -

    Point was with any technology they're usualy problems. If you're willing to pay for worry free more power to you.

    It just irritates me when some, not you, complain about a free service. Blogger went down for one day. (2week?)

    :-)
    Josh

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  7. my posts came back, but the worst thing was the comments from Teke and The Big Guy on my post about the newt got wiped. Their comments were way better than my original post. Unfortunate.

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  8. Joshkie, your comment captures precisely why I am happy to let Blogger do the IT work for me.

    Also, I'd not doubt screw it up more often ... :-/

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  9. Stranger -if you're reading this, I went to check out your blog and got a "Hacked by" somebody graphic, bad loud sounds, and a "f*** Israel and the US"

    Being inside Ubuntu, I don't feel the need to wash out my hard drive out with soap, but y'all be careful.

    ReplyDelete

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