PSA: Livejournal downtime

[matgb]

Next Tuesday, from about 16.00, all Livejournal powered blogs and services will be down for approximately 4 hours. You know what? That's a damn good thing. Last year, when I was considering not renewing my paid account, my principle reason was:

Competing blogging platforms such as Wordpress.com and Blogger.com have a multiple redundancy system for its hosting, so that if one centre fails there are backups elsewhere; specifically, they do not trust all their data security to one location situated the wrong side of a major fault line.

They're moving the servers and location that all of Livejournal is stored on from San Francisco, a beautiful city due to fall into the sea at some point very soon, to a place called Billings in the middle of Montana. They're also, medium term, planning a co-location centre so that there's a backup server farm in case something happens to the main one.

Oh, last time they relocated the servers, there was some issue with spam filters as LJ's current IP is whitelisted, they'll hopefully have sorted things out but comment notifications might go missing for a few days...

So, y'know, no LJ next Tuesday afternoon. Guess I'll have to stay in the pub...

Comments

[insomnia.livejournal.com]

It's hardly that dangerous to host websites in the S.F. Bay Area, which has weathered major quakes, no problem... though frankly I think it's best to co-locate in the South Bay, as they have several good places with offices in the Market Post tower (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_Post_Tower), home to MAE-West, safely ensconced in a high-security ultra safe gold-mirror glassed building in San Jose's downtown, built upon bedrock like much of the Silicon Valley.

Colo'ing in S.F. is silly in comparison. And Billings? Not exactly the high-tech capital of the world, there.

Based on the prior experience of LJ, it seems to me that they're better off having the servers somewhere more readily accessable... unless they can actually find someone who wants to live in Billings.

And besides, Billings (http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=45.644768,-107.193604&spn=4.66986,8.920898&z=7) is well within the 600 mi. deadzone if the supervolcano (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_Caldera) ever goes off again... and it's overdue already! And they have very large earthquakes (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EP7Cnx0xoqw) and massive flooding (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3951/is_200407/ai_n9452436) too!

Frankly, I'd rather risk my data in San Jose.

[matgb]

Bay area, fine, but 365Main isn't in the area, it's in the city and I'm told the wrong side of the fault—my geography isn't that great but this map doesn't look good to me:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Flat_eq_map_anotated.png

Bedrock, anywhere, is good. SF itself isn't, even if it's not likely to be hit by the next big one directly, they don't know that.

I gather they've hired people over there, I know not. Regardless, I'm happy it's moving away from where it is, even if there would've been better places.

And if Yellowstone blows, I'm given to understand that we'll all have a lot more to worry about than our favourite websites anyway...

[wieselkind.livejournal.com]

Do blogger & word press have an equivilant of a friends list page where all your friends posts are collated in one place ? Cause if there is I haven't found it yet :/

[matgb]

Nope. One of LJs main strengths is the friends page. Your best bet is either feeds on LJ or a service like Google Reader.