Plusnet website down – not great for an ISP

Saw on Twitter that the plus.net website is down. Somewhat of a faux pas for an ISP. We’ve probably all suffered from such situations but it is usually extremely embarrassing for the team responsible.

I daresay we will find out what happened in due course. This is a fairly major event because one assumes that plus.net will have a high availability platform for their site – load balancers, multple ip addresses and servers etc etc. All the usual good stuff. They will also have multiple DNS and multiple connections into the platform.

What it says is that nothing can be guaranteed to have 100% uptime. In many industries these days downtime of such a service will be measured in lost cash. The likes of Amazon, eBay etc.

The industry traditionally most sensitive to such scenarios is finance. I recall years ago a pal telling me he’d been to a data centre in the USA where a major bank had a cage. Inside the cage sat three engineers playing cards. They were there in case there was a network problem. Expensive but just part of the cost of insurance.

This isn’t practical for most businesses so they have to rely on a good partner. I don’t think plus.net do any hosting but this would probably harm that side of their business if they have one.

Having been in the situation of running a network which also had data centre resources  I can tell tell you that the only way to ensure a good night sleep is to invest in resources. Qualified staff and quality network design and equipment.

Plusnet will certainly have done this and still have a problem. Hey.

All I can say is that with the plusnet website down the alarm bells will have been ringing at the ISP and a team of guys will be rushing around like blue arsed flies looking to see what is wrong. The best way to get it sorted is to leave them to it.