Re: Amazon.com Failure Demonstrates Poor Design

From: Havah Hope <havah_at_aperfectdealer.com>
Date: Thu 02 Dec 1999 16:06:00 +0200

JAMES CARLINI WROTE:
> Yesterday, amazon.com was down for awhile with the
> message saying that they would be back shortly. Does
> anyone think about downtime as well as reliability and
> redundancy when hyping all of this e-commerce approach?

TO WHICH JIM REARDON REPLIED:
>This sounds like something my old manager would say.
>"Our website is down! The website should never be
>down!"
>Unfortunately, this is the view of a lot of people that
>don't understand the technical side to a technical
>world Every website, no matter how popular, goes down.

I do not think James' point was that the web site
should never be down, and I am sure he understands that
having the website down at 2am EST time is far
preferable than having it down at 6pm EST (although
where I am sitting 2am EST is 9am :-0 a prime shopping
hour over the net...). I think the point is that you
want to prevent as much down time as possible.

If I own a physical store and the power fails I have to
shut. Now if it is during Satuday afternoon that is
really bad (if I remember correctly that is the most
popular shopping hours in the US if not just adjust my
example). Maybe I had a power outage but my competitor
across the street did not. Now, I am really in
trouble. How about the power outage is not my fault?
The telephone company was putting in new phone lines
(no slur meant to telephone company enployees around
the world, just change it to a kid digging in his sand
box with a backhoe) and knocked out all the power on my
side of the street. Well, I have two options. I can
stand around and bemoan all my lost business (some of
it permanently lost, because as we all know customers
like to go where they are used to the store and
employees) or I can buy a back up generator. That way
next time the power goes out I can stay in business.

There *is* a place for redundancy. And there are times
when you cannot help a site being down, but there is NO
excuse for not having backups in place so that when the
site is down it is down for the shortest amount of time
and as infrequently as possible.

Oh, and remember one more thing...the internet is a
worldwide business. It is always rush hour somewhere
in the world.

Havah Hope
Internet Alliances Manager
www.newbalance2000.com
www.aperfectsandal.com
www.dunhamboots.com




Received on Thu Dec 02 1999 - 08:06:00 CST