How will the interwebs be affected if the Big One hits CA?

April 14, 2010 11:54 AM

Should I consider changing from a Bay Area/LA based webhost to a less earthquake-prone region, & if so, where?

With all the recent earthquakes around the Pacific rim, I'm wondering if it would be less disruptive to have my sites hosted elsewhere. Does it even make any difference, with colocations & redundant hosts (if that's what they're called)?

Not to sound indifferent to the suffering that would occur on the West coast should the Big One strike, but life does go on elsewhere.

What *would* happen to the interwebs if the West coast rocked heavily? Would it be any different than when an undersea cable gets cut?

posted by yoga to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

It seems like for every major earthquake that the West Coast has, there's a hurricane for Texas and the Gulf area, a snowstorm knocking out generators in the East, or an old-fashioned data center fire somewhere else. There's a reason there's a lot of California server rooms, and it's not because it's that hard to ssh into a server in Iowa. If your site is truly that critical, you should already have redundant hosts in different parts of the country.
posted by speedgraphic at 12:40 PM on April 14, 2010 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I worked in a San Jose-based hosting firm ten years ago. We bolted the racks to the floors and the buildings were pretty earthquake-proof. I wouldn't worry too hard.
posted by fairytale of los angeles at 2:30 PM on April 14, 2010

Are your sites that important to you? I have always hated having to move hosts but if you seriously worried about a natural disaster taking out your data center maybe you should just have a "back up" server somewhere else that can go live when you need it?
posted by Funky Claude at 3:35 PM on April 14, 2010

Response by poster: Thanks for the answers, all. It's not like my sites are uber critical, more a question of curiosity about the level of inconvenience in the event of a big quake.

Nothing to see here, move along.
posted by yoga at 5:09 AM on April 15, 2010