We (Scred) have been more or less happy with Nebula (and Magenta) in the past. The prices were competitive and the service all right. However, this latest outage has us seriously considering the move to EC2. Six hour outage is bad in itself, but for us Sunday (or sometimes Monday) is the the busiest day of the week. All the people returning from a weekend at the summer cottage and recording their expenses in Scred or syncing their mobile client.

But then again, these things happen. Sometimes equipment simply fails and for many a startup it is often overdoing the high availability setup to try and avoid all such situations.

And, indeed, it was doubly bad because we had just released a huge and critical update. In fact nothing short of a total rewrite from our Perl based solution to Python/Django (although the casual user is unlikely to notice any differences). So it looked a bit embarrassing when we posted our update to people and then suddenly the whole service was down! On the bright side, at least it was not our fault.

I wonder how Finnish hosting companies can compete with those in US in terms of price and uptime? Well,I am not sure about the uptime but quite sure that US companies do offer a cheaper price. For instance, most US blogs and webapps are using dreamhost or media temple. Oh, cloud computing is an excellent alternative. By using Amazon EC2, my load balancing instances only cost me as much as private server rental in Finland. And thanks to the recursive system, only seeing the smoke/fire to start rising over Northern Virginia makes me know that the server fails ^_^

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