Canadian Internet Infrastructure
By Lawrence
This week I could not get stable internet connection for 2 days in a row. I am not talking about having only one internet service here. I have backup solution and backup solution behind my backup solution. I pay for them to ensure my trading is not going to be affected by hiccups with an ISP. But Murphy’s Law somehow loves me much and gave me a hard time, again.
On both days, my three internet connection solutions were took out at the same time. I mean, what’s the freaking possibility that both of the biggest internet service providers in Canada and the biggest cell network all having the same issues? I thought the chance should be near impossible but I am proven wrong.
This does not only affect my ability to trade. It also affect my ability posting my charts. Worst yet, on one of those days, my dedicated servers at a data centre was also affected. This makes me thinking. It is really not acceptable because I am going to offer my line up of new real-time analytics soon. I need a way to deal with this.
It turn out that in Ontario Canada the main internet backbone mostly depends on the infrastructure of two companies. If one goes down, the other one will have to route majority of the internet traffic and it looks like neither one of these companies is capable of taking on the full load of all the internet traffics in many parts of Ontario. Hence, if one goes down, the other one will have serious bottleneck issues if not outright breaking down somewhere within their networks.
What this means is that my so called bulletproof backup solutions are pretty useless when there is a problem at the backbone level in my area. I can actually unsubscribe to one of the internet services now since it is pointless after all.
To resolve this issue, I have to look for a remote data centre not located in Ontario so that my servers will not be affected at the same time when I am suffering from internet outage. In long run, another set of backup servers can run in parallel in yet another physical location to avoid downtime, provided the cost can be covered.
Shopping time for a good data centre outside of Canada. Then more hardware and migration work again.
Keep calm. It seems that your sites function normally during these 2 days.
That’s after my team repairing the data for hours 2 days in a row so that all the auto reporting can proceed normally.