That AWS Outage: Don’t Put All Your Eggs In One Basket

It seems as if it was only yesterday that the GoDaddy hack was revealed and we had some deep thoughts about that. Now, we’re talking about a major outage at a key infrastructure provider that caused a lot of sites and devices to be unavailable for hours.

Imagine for a second that your agency used a hosting service where all sites ended up on AWS. You would not be having a good day.

Unfortunately, many WP hosting services place all their customer sites at a single provider. Being a customer, this is something that is beyond your control.

As the AWS outage drove home, that represents a single point of failure – for your customers and your business.

Outages happen – and to AWS’s credit, it happens rarely for them. But it still happens. So it’s only a matter of time until it happens to one of your other critical suppliers / host.

Being an agency, it’s time to consider either splitting your customer sites among various hosting services or start managing your own WordPress servers distributed worldwide – something that isn’t as difficult as you might think.

Splitting your customers among various server providers or hosting providers around the world mean that the odds of all your customers sites going dark at the same time is far far more remote than an AWS failure (which was already really low to being with).

As the AWS outage shows, “low” does not mean zero. But you can put yourself in a position where you are able to get a lot closer to zero downtime than a single host – by diversifying your hosts or server providers.

Yes, I know, we’re talking our “book” here. But that doesn’t mean the point is invalid.

Between security issues and major outages, you can probably do a lot to reduce risk for your customers by taking on more control yourself – and then upselling your customers on the value.

You do not want to be in a position where 200 of your customer sites are simultaneously unavailable!