Today Amazon reported earnings and they were pretty outstanding (I do not own any AMZN and have not since I unloaded what I purchased as "a friend" on their IPO).  Profits doubled.  Sales up 41%. Not a bad quarter.

Except it reminded me of what happened this past Sunday. 

Amazon’s S3 online storage service experienced significant downtime.  It was not available for about 6 hours (they were also down for about 3 hours back in February).  That is a ton which I will explain shortly.  But for those that do not know, S3 is a distributed storage cloud that many applications such as Twitter and SmugMug use.  They charge $.15 per GB/month and $.10 per GB of data transfer in and a sliding scale starting at $.17 per GB of data out (this is more because Amazon has less slack data out due to the site traffic www.amazon.com generates, is mostly all out).

To provide a little background here, it is a little known fact that for a period of time I ran MindSpring’s product development team.  The developers all reported up to me.  The short story is we were growing so fast we started having some issues pushing products out the door, we went away for a few days to something that became known as the "technology summit", and at the end of the said summit the president of the company gave me the dev team because he wanted one person responsible.  We fixed the issues.  It is during this time that I become intimately knowledgeable about things such as reliability and availability.

Availability is simply the amount of time a service is available (scheduled maintenance downtown excluded).  Availability is typically measured by the number of "nines" delivered.  For example the plain old telephone service that you get from AT&T has an availability of five nines or 99.999% (this is sometimes referred to as telco grade).  Now back in my ISP days we did not shoot for five nines for core services such as mail and web, it would cost too much to so do.  Our objective was four nines or 99.99%.  Now removing one little nine may not seem like much but it makes a big difference in the amount of downtime a service has as you can see in the table below.

99.99% still seems an acceptable level for a mature Internet service.  A startup can get away with two, an emerging company three.  So how is Amazon doing?  For S3 it is pretty straightforward.  S3 year to date is less then 99.9% available, which to me, for a paid service is not acceptable.  This got me to wonder how Amazon’s own site faired.  So I did a little investigating.  And to do so I used information from a neat little company called Pingdon that issues reports on such things from time to time.

The only report on amazon.com was from last April, but through that point of the year the site was only down 21 minutes which on an annual basis equates to just under 99.99% .  I find the disparity very interesting.

Now granted most newer web apps are not going to deliver four nines and this pingdom report shows that.  The 17 social networking apps that they reported on had an average availability of 99.7%.

Here’s the point.  Back in those days of providing Internet services we had "14 Deadly Sins".  One of them was "Rely on outside vendors who let us down".  All the cuteness of the Twitter fail whale meme aside (which i believe is making some companies/individuals behave like excessive downtime is acceptable), if you are going to build a healthy web or SaaS application business the service needs to be available.  If you rely on S3 alone to deliver that availability in a production environment you will fail.  You need an effective fall over plan for when S3 goes down.

This is a review of the TypePad app for the iPhone. I created it on the iPhone.

Or perhaps I should say started on an iPhone because I inadvertently published it after two sentences.  More on that later.

First, the setup did not go off without a hitch.  I downloaded the app last week.  The first thing you have to do is enter your account info.  Which I did. The TypePad server did not like my creds so it returned a username/pass error.  I tried this a few more times (including on my MBA to check I was using the right login) to no avail.  So I opened a ticket with TypePad on Saturday and received a reply Monday.

Laura from TypePad told me to uninstall/reinstall the app.  So I uninstalled on both iTunes and the iPhone, downloaded the app via iTunes and synced it over to the iPhone.  This resulted in an "unknown error" response when submitting the acocunt info.  So I uninstalled again.  And decided to install the app via the App Store accessed via the iPhone itself.  This seemed to work.  I logged in and quickly made a test post with a picture which I published and deleted.  Very easy to use.

Then I started this post.  And while the TypePad iPhone interface is pretty straightforward there is one area that is a bit confusing and resulted in me publishing the first two sentence of this post before I meant to do so. To the left is a screenshot that I ripped from TypePad that shows the Create a Post interface.  Once you start a post you have two high level options, to Cancel or Publish.  Publish does just that.  Tapping Cancel does not actualy cancel the post but leads to a sub menu that provides options to Save to Drafts, Don’t Save, and Cancel.  Having a Draft button at the high level sure would make things more clear.

Adding pictures to posts is a snap.

I could find no functionality to create a hyperlink and given the speed at which I can type on an iPhone that sure would be nice cause doing HTML is just not going to happen.

While I think that this app is a must for anyone with a TypePad blog, like Dave whose WordPress app article inspired this post, I don’t think I will be using this app on a regular basis (if TypePad added the functionality to manage existing posts and comments that would certainly change).  The overall experience of typing on the iPhone is much better suited to microblogging platforms such as Twitter.

Here is the article on the TypePad blog announcing the iPhone app.