Report: Major Newspaper Sites Hobbled by Power Woes

Wed Jul 6 17:58:31 UTC 2005

Fergie writes:
> A power outage at an Advance Internet hosting facility
> has hobbled the web sites for the company's chain of
> more than 30 newspapers, including many large metropolitan
> dailies. The Advance newspapers have switched to text-based
> sites to continue publishing, but are currently unable to
> display advertising, making the outage a potentially costly event. 
> http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/07/06/major_newspaper_sites_hobbled_by_power_woes.html

On 7/6/05, Steve Sobol <sjsobol at justthe.net> wrote:
> Yes, but Advance Internet isn't an ISP, it's a division of Newhouse
> Newspapers and exists primarily to service the Newhouse new media outlets.
> Cleveland.com, for example, is co-owned with the Cleveland _Plain Dealer_.
> 
> You'd think the company would be more careful about protecting a major
> extension to its core business.

In Newhouse's defense, they do seem to have a plan to get the news out
even after losing their hosting facility, just not how to make money from it :)

If you pick just about any major newspaper group and do reverse lookups
and traceroutes on the IP addresses of their public "news" web sites, you
will likely find the same situation for many newspaper chains -- all their eggs
in one basket.  I've seen similar outages for other groups, just never quite
this long-lasting.

Advance may have thought this exposure through, and determined the
risk of hosting all their web sites in a single data center was worth the
cost savings over building and maintaining identical deployments at two
physically diverse hosting facilities, but did CYA and build a DR site
with just enough horsepower to get the news out, but not enough to keep
the revenue coming in, betting that most outages would be short lived.

Not all bets can be winners.

Kevin Kadow