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Comment by Aloisius | Hacker News Reader

Just pay the extra money and get off US-East people.

EU-West had similar levels of outage last year due to a lightening strike. Twas out for several hours and took a few days for everything to be back to normal.

Acts of God can happen anywhere.

You certainly mean bad weather, don't you?

Yes, that's what Act of God means in the US legal system. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_of_God

God. Legal term. Funny things.

My appologies. I still believe it's wrong to call it that way because it assumes too many things. Another way to word it is Force Majeure. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_majeure

No, it isn't another way to word it. Force majeure includes acts of nature _and_ acts of man. Acts of God is only acts of nature.

It's somewhat important to the original spirit of the comment since Acts of God might indeed happen anywhere (1) whereas acts of man might not. For example, disruption caused by on going war in Syria wouldn't be covered by an Act of God clause.

(1) I think that's BS though...there are definitely some places where nature is considerably more stable than others.

% of overhead power lines in the US are much greater than say in Amsterdam...

us-west-2 is the same price as us-east-1. Price is no excuse anymore.

Latency to Europe kind of is, if you want to be in a single site with acceptable ping times to Europe, US East, and US West. But I'd rather just solve replication and be in each.

If latency to Europe is an issue, why not just have a few machines in their Ireland datacenter?

Because distributing sites across multiple regions is hard -- high latency between your front end and database sucks, and replicating a database over high latency is also hard. If you can do it, great, but if you can't, then pick the best single region.

US East or US West plus Direct Connect to your own colo space, with AWS for the burst capacity, and your own redundancy for the database servers, might be the best plan if you can't do wide area "over the Internet" database replication. (I might get an extra 10G DC (since I need 1G DC myself) and then have some colo for sale with it in US East/US West later this year.)

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