If I was Rackspace, I'd be at Reddit/Wired's headquarters already.
I wonder if Rackspace really want this particular traffic burden. It seems that if Reddit choose not to pay for the load they need then you get lot's of bad press for it ... perhaps I'm seeing it wrong.
Rubbish analogy: Kinda like if I was doing a haulage business and you called out for a wheelbarrow to carry some elephants, then when the barrows broke we got bad press despite. If you'd paid for a heavy animal transport package ... OK it's all going wrong, you get the idea.
However, in this case, the outage is not because of any issues with our setup, but with Amazon.
So is it a financial constraint with Amazon? Would you be suffering the same sorts of outages regardless of the technology on the backend or does AWS basically suck?
Statements like the one you're quoting are in that context. Let's say you have an unlimited operating budget - you can come up with all kinds of wonderful plans for massive redundancy and zero downtime. But you can't make that happen if you're not allowed to hire any engineers or sysadmins! As far as I'm aware reddit are paying Amazon mucho dinero but still having irredeemable problems with the storage product, EBS. They are stuck on an unreliable service without the manpower to move off.
That's the story, as far as I can piece together from comments here and on reddit.
It's not making money and those looking after reddit don't want to ruin it with a huge money grab - instead taking a soft approach, first just begging for money, then adding in a subscription model (freemium anyone?) and more subtle advertising by way of sponsored reddits (/r/yourCompany'sProduct type stuff).
I understand they've been hit with more staff problems just recently despite having a new [systems?] engineer start with them.
So in your view EBS is the problem regardless of finance? That was the nut I was attempting to crack. TBH I didn't expect someone at reddit to stick their neck out and say "yeah Amazon sucks" but they might have confirmed that the converse was true and they were simply lacking the necessary finance to support the massive userbase they have.
Is this really so or are Racksoace and co. Just "boutique" offerings?