Hobu, Inc.

Some may have noticed hobu.biz had a week long outage a couple of weeks ago (not that I post enough for many to notice anymore).  This outage was related to the fact that the building that houses this server in Cedar Rapids had 10ft of water in the first floor for five days and the backup generator for the machine room had its wiring plumbed through the basement — preventing its usage.  Up until the 1000 year flood, my ISP had performed reasonably well except for the fact that they are rather expensive … $250/mo for 2U and 1.5mb of bandwidth.  I could have probably gotten a much cheaper colo someplace else, but it was the only thing within reasonable driving distance to Iowa City, so I took it at the time.

My ISP didn’t really handle the flood too well, and it was almost a week after the power was pulled on the machine before I was contacted.  A 1000 year flood was definitely not something they had planned for in their five 9’s ISO planning, and while understandable, me and my clients found it unacceptable.  Besides an unclean shutdown, hobu.biz is still diesel-powered and will be for the foreseeable future.  With the situation fluid and unstable, I started looking for alternatives…

I had been watching Amazon’s developer services for a while, and with the flood I’ve had strong motivation to investigate more fully.  I found the offering to be quite impressive, and I think I will be moving all of my essential services and websites to EC2 once I get an image built and my 3TB of data migrated.  I think EC2 and its competitors are really going to put the squeeze on the mom and pop ISPs with a 42U rack and a DS3 line.   

Are you running stuff on EC2?  GIS stuff?  What have your experiences been?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 at 9:52 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.