Sandy Knocks Down HuffPost, Gawker And Some Other Websites

Hurricane Sandy seems to have wrecked as much damage as was expected of it. The storm pushed the water from the sea right into the streets of New York, flooding many important places including data centers. This has led to the knock-down of at least three very popular websites.


Sandy

These three include the Gawker, the Huffington Post and finally BuzzFeed. While other websites have been busy in actively covering the storm and gathering feedback, these three websites have been struggling to stay visible online.

All three of them were hosted on Datagram, which has its data center based in New York. However, when the floods hit the city and caused large-scale power problems, the data center lost its power and consequently, all three websites went down.

However, they acted quickly to adapt to the situation. Huffington Post, for instance, put up a bare-bones page of its own since it seems unable to access its older content from Datagram as of yet.

Gawker is gawking again via Tumblr, with the Gawker founder Nick Denton having mentioned on Twitter, “How dumb to locate data center in a flood zone. And how dumb to host Gawker servers there.”

BuzzFeed is also currently relying on stand-alone Tumblr accounts to stay afloat amid all the water. Meanwhile, Datagram is being criticized by multiple quarters for having put in place poor back-up plans in case of an emergency like this.

Many have cited that in the era of cloud computing, its absurd to see a mainstream website going down. According to such analysts, websites need to have multiple data backups in cloud and elsewhere which can be accessed instantly if any data center goes down.

Source: GMA Network

Courtesy: All Things D

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Salman

Salman Latif is a software engineer with a specific interest in social media, big data and real-world solutions using the two.Other than that, he is a bit of a gypsy. He also writes in his own blog. You can find him on Google+ and Twitter .

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