Recently we announced that we moved our hosting from an in-house server to Amazon Web Services. This is exciting for many reasons, and in general it went well. Immediately we got emails saying JibberJobber was simply faster… something we noticed, too.
Why did it take so long?
Partially because back in 2006, when we launched, AWS was new enough that they were still experiencing issues…. like something going down. And when part of AWS goes down, it can take down tens of thousands of websites. Literally tens of thousands. Back then I chose to keep JibberJobber on our own server to have more control, even though there are plenty of things that could have (and some that did) go wrong.
Over the years I got plenty of emails saying “why not move to Amazon,” or AWS, as people call it. The Amazon Cloud.
I just wasn’t ready yet. Until a few months ago, when the sun, moon, and stars had aligned, and it was time.
We moved, it was good, and I’m excited!
However, the move isn’t without potential hiccups… AWS problems are not strictly a thing of the past. Just yesterday the AWS Northern Virginia site had issues, and took down a bunch of sites for about 4 hours.
Why am I posting this? Well, just as a point-of-reference documentation in case JibberJobber goes down again, to remind myself that AWS offers us loads of benefits, but it’s not 100% failsafe. There are always risks.
Alas, we take the bad with the good, and work to have a great solution for you, long term. There’s a lot that goes into making JibberJobber a tool for job seekers around the world!
Still worth it for the speed and, yes, reliability.
Outages like that are rare, other sites back them up – especially if you use a CDN like Cloudfront (I think that is their service) and they have the staff to fix stuff.
Unfortunately, stuff still happens 🙂
Totally true, and we have no regrets. It’s where we need to be. But, I’m waiting for the time that we go down, so I can point back to this post 🙂