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Comment by emcooke | Hacker News Reader

Ironically, this highlights one of the main issues we discuss in the post!

The Twilio Engineering blog is hosted off an external Wordpress site with a single IP that's forwarded from ngnix load balancer pool. Since the load balancers assume that the external service can fail, they won't tied resources blocking access to other parts of the site.

Hope you enjoy the post :)

-Evan Twilio.com

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Why not stick an angel-mode Varnish in between? Serving stale blog is usually better than no blog!

Yup, good idea. We set up an ngnix proxy to cache the page while the blog hosting provider fixes their server.

Evan, I just noticed that your service seems to be running on Slicehost, not the AWS colo in Virginia. Is that correct? I got the opposite impression from your post, which seems to imply that Twilio is hosted on AWS, yet managed to weather the storm because of your design decisions.

Our main infrastructure is deployed on AWS but we have capacity at several cloud providers for load-balancing, redundancy, etc.

Ah, I see it now. I just got a POST from one of your servers in the AWS US-West region. Is Twilio also hosted in US-East (the region affected by today's outage), and, if so, would Twilio have stayed up if it hadn't been spread across multiple regions?

Eggs and baskets.

Speaking of highlighting, something about Disqus' markup/styles causes your blog text to be un-highlightable with mouse (Firefox 3.6.16 Debian 5.0.8).

Thanks for the heads up, I've disabled Disqus comments for now... was also causing some issues for iPhone/iPad readers. Regular commenting is enabled

You were born to work at Twillio.

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