[_3u10]

This reminds me of doing tech support back during the dot bomb. Everyday we'd have day traders phone in complaining that their internet was down and they were losing thousands of dollars. Then I'd advise them to switch to their backup connection, then they'd say they didn't have one.

Finally, I'd ask why if they were running a business that could generate / lose thousands of dollars in a few minutes why they had chosen a residential internet service instead of opting for the business package and why they did not have a backup connection as neither the business packages or residential packages came with a SLA that was suitable for the type of risk inherent in their business.

If their data is so important why are they hosting it on the absolute cheapest and shittiest servers they can find without a backup solution in place? If they read the TOS for EC2 it probably says not to run critical infrastructure on it.

Perhaps for sensitive data upon which people's lives depend they might want to look into something like:http://h20223.www2.hp.com/nonstopcomputing/cache/76385-0-0-0...

Yes, it costs more than EC2, but there's a reason for that. Wait until this company finds out that if their values exceed what MySQL expects it will silently truncate it.