Pro-Tip – when you are using a CoLo for your servers:
* Make sure you failover to servers in a separate cabinet.
* Better yet, make sure you failover to servers in a different data center.
* Best Possible – Configure a task to switch your primary and
failover environment from data center to data center
once a week at random times. Or eliminate the concept of primary
and secondary altogether.
Who knows what others servers are located in the cabinet you are sharing. The good news is your mitigation process also becomes a first class disaster recovery plan as well.
And if you're really serious about having the best possible failure-resistant system, install a chaos monkey[1] into your system and learn to live with it
America doesnt need freaky raids like those at this time. If i own a web based business i would seriously consider alternative hosting countries... because honestly between the Patriot act and the actual raids, no business should feel safe.
Or the FBI could just go through the proper channels like everyone else and contact the datacenter and request it's immediate takedown (after providing a warrant, of course). This isn't the first time the FBI busted into a data center all willy-nilly knocking innocent peoples hardware offline. Not only does this adversely effect the innocent users, it also almost destroys the datacenters reputation and it's a loss for nearly every party.
FBI seizures are only a tiny fraction of outages. Lots of things knock out servers: power failures, water leaks, A/C failures, theft, fire, explosions, zombie outbreaks, runaway forklifts, mice chewing on cables.
The only solution is backup hosting in a separate data center.
Honestly, the only legit reason for an outage is some natural disaster took down the entire building. I really wouldn't want my server hosted at a mice infested building anyway, or one without backup power, cheap A/C units, etc. To me, it looks much worse that your server went offline because the FBI busted into the datacenter and knocked shit around than say an earthquake took out our fiber lines.
Personally, if I heard the FBI raided a datacenter and knocked a bunch of servers offline which had nothing to do with what they were after, then I'd seriously question the security, legal team, and response team of that place. To me, it sounds like the FBI just showed up to one guy sitting in a chair watching TV and let the FBI roam free.
You're dreaming if you think a data center outage can't happen at any reasonably-priced data center. It doesn't matter what they promised or what high tech equipment they have. It happens at Google and at Amazon and it will happen to you too, eventually.
"The raid happened at 1:15 a.m. at a hosting facility in Reston, Va., used by DigitalOne, which is based in Switzerland, the company said... DigitalOne had no employees on-site when the raid took place. The data center operator, from which DigitalOne leases space, passed along the information about the raid three hours after it started with the name of the agent and a phone number to call."
I've tried to buy servers in good places, but it doesn't always work out. We're dropping a Hurricane Electric (he.net) server because despite all their high-end claims we've had three major outages in the past year.
If you care to try, I'd say give Softlayer a shot. You get tons of free stuff that other places charge for (KVM over IP, VPN, etc) and the only outage I've had so far was because Level 3 announced routes for Comcast IP's and then null routed them, lasted about 45 minutes and effected a lot more than Softlayer.
