Someone with a lot of time on their hands might wonder why, when we are an Internet hosting provider, we disseminate our status updates on Twitter. Aren’t we effectively using (and advertising) a competitor?
Well there’s a good reason we use Twitter and no, we’re not in competition with Twitter (which is good as we’d probably be out of business if we were).
We use Twitter because it’s an off-network independent service i.e. it’s availability is unrelated to our network or services in any way. This means that, on the rare occasions when stuff gets real, our update channel for customers is unaffected by whatever has caught fire at our end. No matter how bad the outage with Verrotech services, we can keep everyone abreast of the situation and estimated repair times etc, or even engage directly with customers with DMs.
But what if Twitter fails?
Twitter is of course outside our control, but they have pretty good availability (not Verrotech-good of course, but pretty good). When they do fail for it to be a problem it would have to coincide with a major Verrotech outage as well, which is very unlikely.
To mitigate this anyway for status news we use what we call the availability update tripod of power. That is, our availability news and customer updates has three strong legs.
The latest Verrotech infrastructure (VETS) which we migrated all services onto in January 2016 is built around high-availability virtualisation. The customer facing/Internet facing portion of these are segregated into two main stacks (aka platforms): Stavros and Hektor. These are physically separated platforms in different data centres and with different redundant network links.
These two platforms make up two of the legs, as standard the main website (and blog etc) will be hosted on one and the status.verrotech.com page on the other. Thanks to the wonders of our setup we can actually migrate one to the other in less than a minute but even if that failed, one of those sites would be available and pumping out news.
This is combined with Twitter (the third leg) to mean if you have two URLs bookmarked and follow @verrotechstatus on Twitter, you should never be out of the loop.