Reassuring words from our hosting provider

The BBC posted an article yesterday stating a serious Amazon Web Services outage had been 'resolved' as Snapchat and banks were among sites adversely impacted for several hours during the day.

Quote: "Amazon ... said ... the issue "appears to be related to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in US-EAST-1"."

A contributor to the business section of the BBC Radio 4 Today programme this morning reported that Amazon, along with Microsoft and Google provide 70% of global cloud computing.

This prompted me to question which cloud services are used by our own company's supplier of web hosting and domain registrar services: Krystal Hosting.

Source: BBC report Amazon outage 'resolved' as Snapchat and banks among sites impacted.

So I raised a support ticket with Krystal Hosting Technical Support, and was amazed to receive a reply from Jordan, Shared Hosting Support Lead, within minutes!

I asked

Is provision of web hosting service by Krystal dependent upon one of the three big cloud service providers (AWS, Microsoft, Google)?

If not then which cloud service provider?

Is there complete separation of DNS server and web hosting server provision?

Reason for asking on behalf of my company and those of its customers who also use Krystal web hosting and domain registrar services: reassurance that Krystal's services and our websites will remain resilient if similarly impacted at some future time. 

He replied

"We do not use AWS, Microsoft or Google for our hosting infrastructure at: https://krystal.io/.

We use our own complete hardware utilising our own Katapult cloud platform: https://katapult.io/.

We do separate DNS and web hosting, yes.

We have a DNS cluster which uses an array of servers with DNS servers at other providers as a backup (for redundancy).

In the event of a catastrophe, you would certainly be able to restore things quite quickly".

My response

I feel reassured that, in the event of a similar such catastrophe affecting our company or our customers, we should be able to respond in a resilient manner.

For example, if the cloud were to be compromised then we should be able move a website away and point its domain name(s) to its new location.

Periodic performance of full website backups is of course the lynchpin here, with frequency dependent upon how often the website content is updated.

If connection to the server hosting a website were to be broken for a significant period of time then this precaution should facilitate restoration of full website visibility just as soon as revised DNS settings for its domain name were to resolve.

My concern 

My concern is that the UK appears to be coming ever more dependent on a very small number of non-UK companies.

Others share my concern, for example, Cori Crider, head of the Future of Technology Institute, who told the BBC:

"Once you have a concentrated supply in a handful of monopoly providers, when something like this (the AWS outage) falls over, it takes a huge percentage of the economy out with it. We should really look at trying to buy more local services, rather than relying on a handful of American monopoly platforms."

"That's a risk to our security, our sovereignty and our economy and we need to look at structural separations to make our markets more resilient to these kind of shocks."

This begs the question whether or not our Members of Parliament are providing the competent oversight of Government so badly needed by our democracy if it is not to morph into a corporatocracy?

My hope

My hope is that the UK Government will get behind the many UK-based competitors to the mega USA-based cloud service providers.

For example: Katapult (see link above).

An anecdote

A few years ago I was invited to a meeting with our local MP after I registered my concern following receipt of a rather threatening letter from The Pension Regulator.

I remember being astonished to hear the MP say they were not familiar with Automatic Enrolment.

I was shocked because the MP had been supposedly 'holding the Government to account' when the relevant legislation had been passing though Parliament.

My fear

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Who will watch the watchmen?

Read more: Who will watch the watchmen? (Wikipedia)