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Comment by jaequery | Hacker News Reader

with storms getting worse each year, i'll likely be choosing either central or westcoast datacenters ... from now on.

Tornadoes in the midwest and earthquakes in the west. You're doomed.

Seriously though, as horrible as downtime is, I think most internet users aren't terribly surprised when they can't go to a specific website for a short period of time.

Any press is good press? Can't count the number of times I read about the Twitter fail whale.

I'd be interested in seeing someone polish this turd. How would you spin amazon being down into good press when people are looking for reliability. Only thing I can think of is people will be writing about you and that should increase your page rank but I doubt amazon is concerned about higher page rank.

Anyone else care to speculate how this could be good press?

It could be an opportunity to explain what reliability actually is (it's not "pack one availability zone with all your stuff") and how AWS helps you achieve that.

That's awesome spin. So Amazon gives you the Chaos Monkey, whether you like it or not.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/04/working-with-the-ch...

"I can't run my business/research/whatever"

"This site is so popular it barely works"

For ecommerce, people will just got buy somewhere else. So not to big a deal for them but a really big deal to your bottom line. Especially when you are still paying for traffic acquisition, sure you can turn Adwords off in minutes but other traffic sources may take 24 hours.

If you're willing to go outside AWS...Denver. We occasionally see tornadoes out here, but Denver is outside "Tornado Alley" [1], so they're pretty rare. On the WikiPedia tornado page they set the odds of a tornado hitting the downtown area of a big city at around one in a thousand per year.

If you want to be extra paranoid, you could always pick a secondary data center location where it would be safer in the summer, since Denver would be safe from tornadoes in the winter. [2] Or you could just put one on the West Coast and hope that there's not a 1-in-a-thousand tornado within a week of a big earthquake.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tornado_Alley_Diagram.svg

[2] http://www.weather.com/outlook/weather-news/severe-weather/a...

Tornadoes in the midwest and earthquakes in the west. You're doomed.

Yup, everywhere has got its natural disasters.

The Europe (Ireland) location is pretty high up the "nothing interesting ever happens here" scale.

What about the revolution?

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