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More Eggs in More Baskets: How the AWS Outage Made Us Stronger

Like a lot of web companies, we learned some hard lessons from the Amazon Web Services outage of a few weeks ago.   We didn't lose a single byte of data, but we resolved never again to put one service provider—no matter how large and diversified—in a position where its failure could cause a serious interruption in service for our customers.

As promised, we 've now finished setting up automated data backup and redundant server infrastructure in facilities maintained by a completely separate company: Softlayer Technologies.  Like AWS, Softlayer maintains the high security and reliability standards we require, including SAS 70 Type II Certification and PCI DSS Compliance.  And their Texas location adds geographic diversity to the Virginia and California regions Amazon gives us access to.

This is in no way the end of our efforts to improve reliability and security.  We'll keep refining backup, failover and recovery processes to ensure not only that our customers' data is safe but that it remains available to a rapidly growing user base.  Still, we wanted to mark this milestone as a way of making clear that the lesson was not only learned but acted on.

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