The Magnolia bursts

How to lose four years of your life in a few days - a lesson to IT startups. ma.gnolia.com social bookmarking site disappears in a puff of data due to amateur infrastructure. There are some serious questions to ask about this whole amateur cowboy web startup cloud open thing. I've questioned the quality or craftsmanship or durability of what is being built. I've questioned the long-term preservation of it. Now we can also question the expertise of those building it. Think about where your data is and who you are entrusting it to.

the IT Operations expertise of the majority of readers of this site never goes out of style. Keep the faith folks, the world needs us. All these spotty faced geeks trying in their back room to be Mark Zuckerberg - they learn the hard lessons in the end. As do the kid developers mashing up Java Web Services contraptions and flinging them over the wall. Reality bites.

For those wondering, this site is housed in a professional data center in Utah USA, with 24x7 managed servers and daily backups to tape, and irregular backups of SQL export source data to New Zealand for disaster recovery. In the event of Yellowstone erupting again, we'd lose a few weeks or even months of posts - I can live with that. Development is done and tested on a totally isolated server in NZ.

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