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Whos to blame when a Web site crashes? The site owner? The host? The supplier of the back-end software?
The blame game doesnt seem to have started—at least not publicly—in the case of MySpace.com, the latest mega-Web site to go down.
MySpace is one of the largest sites on the Web. As of February 2006, there were more than 64 million registered MySpace users, with 260,000 new registered users signing up each day.
The site was garnering 23 billion page views per month, according to Media Metrix data.
A power outage in the companys Los Angeles-area datacenter took the entire MySpace site down completely for hours, starting on the evening of July 23.
For hours after that, performance of the site was erratic.
“Apparently [it was] a single source of failure scenario for a systems with millions of users—yikes,” said Peter OKelly, an analyst with the Burton Group. “I suspect it was simply inadequate risk management planning on the part of the MySpace operations team. I doubt it was something related to Microsoft software problems.”
A MySpace spokesperson would not comment when asked about the companys disaster recovery plans.
She also declined to specify how many data centers the company runs, where they are located or whether MySpace has any kind of mirroring capabilities.
MySpace officials did provide some details about the companys back-end infrastructure, however, during the course of a couple of Microsoft conferences earlier this year.