Discussion on:

Amazon's S3 storage service suffers downtime

Still, there is no doubt that confidence is definitely shaken all around. Would you still consider making use of Amazon?s S3 or similar hosted computing offerings?

Editor Thompson,

You did Mr. Schofield an injustice by not including an earlier paragraph he wrote. Your editing made him look as though he is "down" on Amazon's S3 service more than he really is. In fact, he also said this:

"Cloud computing does not need to be 99.999% reliable to get adopted by Web 2.0 companies. It makes sense to adopt it because it's cheap and because you don't need much technical competence to do it. It therefore meets Web 2.0 needs very nicely."

Context! Context! Context! We have plenty of hype-meisters out here already, TechRepublic does not need to foster more Chicken-Little-ism. There may be many who are focusing on the glass 0.1% empty, but the thinkers understand the claim and the purpose behind Adobe S3 and will not be completely aghast when it does not fill a purpose for which it is not designed.

We use cloud computing providers (such as AWS) to provide a commercial service to our customers. While downtime is unacceptable in any market, and especially not in a commoditized market where customers demand a solid user experience. I wrote a quick blog post on how we use multiple providers to ensure that our service is rock solid:
http://www.spoutingshite.com/2009/11/03/downtime-is-unacceptable/