Posts by Reggy's Tar.

Power cut hits Rackspace UK

Five '9's not really appropriate for rented web servers.

The 2,3,4,and 5 '9's is a baseline SLA tool designed to show how much downtime a system can tolerate before it is considered to affect the purpose of the system. For example in the case of a banking system, that is how long before the cost of bringing the system up is lower than the money you are losing, which in most cases is a very very short time indeed, so we aim for the 5 nines.

In the case of rented hosting, it's probably reasonable to suggest that a longer period of downtime should elapse before compensation payments are triggered.

The downtime is worked out roughly like this:

One nine 90.0% 36 days 12 hours

Two nines 99.0% 87 hours 36 minutes

Three nines 99.9% 8 hours 46 minutes

Four nines 99.99% 52 minutes 33 seconds

Five nines 99.999% 5 minutes 35 seconds

Six nines 99.9999% 31.5 seconds

So, over a year, 99% means that about 3.65 days downtime is expected. A hosting company that offers you an SLA of 99% is saying that you can't really complain until the overall downtime in the last 12 months reaches 3.65 days.

A 99.9% SLA is 8 hours in a year and so on.

Five '9's is only 5 minutes or so. I think it would be unreasonable to ask for a low-cost shared hosting company to aim for a five '9's target, so we should probably be sceptical of those that claim they can.

Uniquely, Rackspace offer a 100% Infrastructure Availability Guarentee. Which suggests they pay out for anytime your site or server is not available. That definitely sounds fanatical, and I actually find that promise more believable that some company that throws in the term 99.999% uptime.

However I am not a Rackspace customer, but I would be interested to know if any of their customers received credits or cool hard cash as a result of todays power outage.

Facebook founder loses court battle to keep personal data offline

Three cheers for the US courts

At last some payback for all those people who opened a Facebook account with no real idea of teh imapct it would have on their lives.

Unfortunately, it won't really hit Zuckerberg in the pocket, unlike the many people who have lost jobs or failed to find work as a result of some poorly judged utterances on the site that can never be deleted.

Shame on you Zuckerberg, may your personal details shine happily on the web forever, or until you allow people to delete their accounts permanently.

Fasthosts customers blindsided by emergency password reset

Plain text passwords are 'sensible'??

As I understand it, the hacked passwords were not in a database, but in plain text. They were used to support the 'Forgotten Password' tool that is currently switched off on the Fasthosts site.

So, this "Emergency Procedure" was triggered one month after Fasthosts realised that plain text is not a good security policy. During that month, they had plenty of time to notify customers that the password would be changed by force.

Which part of what happened last night do you consider 'sensible'?