Ok, let’s retract that headline at once. If you’re a SaaS provider, especially a really big one, having a backup facility makes an awful lot of sense. When you provide a service over the internet you have an obligation to your customers to do your best to assure that your service is always available (or at least really close to it).
That’s why it’s interesting to see that NetSuite, a SaaS provider with $67 million in revenues in 2006, 5,300 customers and preparing to go public, state in their filings that they don’t have a backup facility.
We host our services and serve all of our customers from a single third-party data center facility located in California. We do not control the operation of this facility. … Our data facility is located in an area known for seismic activity, increasing our susceptibility to the risk that an earthquake could significantly harm the operations of this facility. … We do not currently operate or maintain a backup data center for any of our services or for any of our customers’ data, which increases our vulnerability to interruptions or delays in our service.
Considering the amount of customers and the revenue they have (a lot of money is being thrown around there), perhaps it would be a good idea for them to have a backup location? NetSuite apparently doesn’t plan to add one until sometime in 2008.
Hey, it’s not like anything can go wrong in California. Right…?
Source: Data Center Knowledge.
