Category Archives: Systems Administration

Better uptime than Google, Rackspace, and Amazon?

Smooth Flying
Better than Air Kazakstan!

Yep.

In 2009 Brownrice provided our hosting, co-location, and virtual server customers with 100% network up-time for the entire year – soundly besting the volume-based hosting companies.

OK, full disclosure: Our network was down for a total of 3 minutes and 11 seconds for the calendar year.  I think that was when Dave rebooted one of our main switches.

How did we fair against the big boys?

Google had multiple network outages.  Amazon’s cloud went down.  Rackspace had multiple extended network outages which brought down many of the biggest sites on the internet.  Many hosting providers who co-locate in the Rackspace data centers suffered from their outages as well. And Dreamhost – who advertises a goofy 100% up-time guarantee (read the fine print, it’s funny) – seemed to have nearly daily network failures.

Why is our up-time so good?  Because our network is quadruple-redundant, impervious to fiber cuts, and because we are small.

Why is being a small provider good?  Because we run less than 100 servers – instead of hundres of thousands – most of which are in our own, on-site mini data center, where the size of our operation allows us isolate and fix problems extremely quickly.

I’ve always known that our staff is smarter, more experienced, and provide better – and friendlier – support than the volume-based hosting companies.  Now the raw data is proving that we are more reliable as well.