Life online

I was off-line most of the weekend, spending some time with the wife, celebrating Saint Patricks’s Day, attending the “Survivor’s Party” the next night at Byrne’s Pub, etc. I finally got on-line Sunday evening to discover that the phpBB software on my child abuse site had been hacked, this site was, for some reason, not displaying pages, and Blogger was down. All at the same time, making it rather difficult to get anything done!

Once again, this points out one of the fatal flaws of the software as a service, do everything on-line with no local software or storage needs outlook, doesn’t it? If I trust my data to someone else’s servers, what happens when I can’t connect to them? Lucky for me this is all just a hobby, so some down time doesn’t hurt me, it’s just annoying. What if I was a business using on-line tools for CRM? I’d be pretty hosed if the service was unavailable, wouldn’t I? What if I had to spend a lot of time dealing with hacked info and spammers? At what point is it counter-productive?

All that being said, I think I’m just going to drop the phpBB software on the other site. I liked being able to provide a place for folks to post but I’m spending a lot more time weeding out spammers signing up for accounts than I am reading anything new being posted. I need to find some other way of doing this.

Update: A rather timely question from WinXPNews the very next day: Can You Trust Online Services with your Data?

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