Feed.Us can help prevent down time

Back in 2001, at our old company, our host went out for 3 days and knocked out service to all of our customers.  Then their DNS system went out for another 3 days.  It was by far the worst experience of my life.  Our customers depended on us and we couldn't do anything about it. We were lucky to survive through it.

I was reminded of that horrible event yesterday.  WordPress.com went down and with it went a couple hundred thousand websites, including TechCrunch (full story here.)

This wouldn't have happened if those sites used Feed.Us.  Here's why:

We built Feed.Us knowing full well that at some point our hosting company might screw up.  We have a great host - but that stuff eventually happens.  But if Feed.Us ever goes down (it hasn't happened yet but it is possible), Feed.Us won't take our customers with it. 

Feed.Us 'feeds' content to your server at your hosting provider.  Your site is built with PHP or Rails or the platform of your choosing -- not with some bloated content management system. So if we have a problem, Feed.Us won't take down your site.  Your site will continue to function as normal. You just won't be able to publish new content until Feed.Us is accessable.

But your host could go down and screw you.  And to defend against this sort of problem, some Feed.Us customers have created backup, fully functional websites. For example our demo sites  FeedUsDemoPHP.com and FeedUsonRails.com are the very same websites - but hosted at different providers in different states but with the same content (also on different platforms - PHP & Rails, respectively).

In the event of this type of crash, the publisher can just switch the DNS and be back up again (yes, DNS is slow to propagate) .

Please contact us if you would like more of an explaination.