[RobAley]

Do also bear in mind that Fogcreek haven't always stuck to their word on how they will keep their systems up and running (see thread [1] in story [2]).

No company, or service/facility that a company states will stick around, is guaranteed to stick around. Trawl back through the archives on HN and you'll find tale after tale of (previously) reputable companies backtracking, cancelling projects, going bust etc.

Make sure you always keep hold of your data!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4722056 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4721028

[mhp]

"Fogcreek [sic] haven't always stuck to their word on how they will keep their systems up and running".

What do you mean by this? It sounds like you are suggesting that "how" we keep our systems up and running is required to be the same at all times. Why should people care about "how" we do it, just that it's done? For awhile, we had a second data center in Toronto instead of LA. Trello moved to AWS, so it doesn't need a 'second' data center. I don't think we should be derided because we changed the way we keep our systems up and running.

"Make sure you always keep hold of your data!" - Business Class has a great export function :)

Also, minor point, it's Fog Creek, not Fogcreek.

[RobAley]

Apologies for the misspelling.

You used the second data-center to sell FogBugz on Demand to your customers. You didn't tell them that you no longer had it. It went down when the storm hit NY, and there was no backup data centre.

If you change the way you keep up your systems, and keep them up, no one minds. When you don't, people rightly question what you've told them in the past and wonder if what you're telling them now fits into the same categories.

I'm aware you have export functions, thats great. My message was to your customers who need to remember to utilise them. Thats not a dig at your company, its applies to any SaaS providers.

I hope my spelling was correct this time around, apologies if not. FYI, "fog creek" is not capitalised correctly in your HN profile, just letting you know so you can keep the brand in check.

[atesti]

Can you clarify when FogBugz on Demand was in two data centers and when not, no matter whether it's in LA or Toronto? Back then it was really interesting that Joel found SQL Server Mirroring not usable and instead wrote that they went to manually coded Log shipping for SQL server. At the same time I was experimenting with the same techniques and was very interested in this, so I also remembered it closely and wondered about it once the bucket brigade story was told.

[mhp]

There will probably be a blog post in a couple of months about the latest infrastructure changes that we've added. Keep an eye out for that.

[RobAley]

> Can you clarify when FogBugz on Demand was in two data centers and when not...

> There will probably be a blog post in a couple of months...

That'll be a "no", then.

[atesti]

I bet in the end it was not really such a disadvantage for all the OnDemand customers: Imagine they had the two data centers: The log shipping Joel "sold" us would have had a nasty side effect: If someone makes the call to do the switch over, everyone would have lost the last few hours of work!! All customer mail, all bug events would be gone.

Well one could say that in the particular case it might have worked out: They knew about Sandy in advance and had a bit of time until the lights went out. But if it happens unexpected, it's a tough call to make: Keep it running or keep the last data since the last log shipping?

If on the other hand they had gone with Sql mirroring, it's likely that there would have been quite some outage just because of the mirroring: If one of the two data centers went down, the whole system would be down, it's often like that with failover systems