Ever since FeedBurner launched I’ve been a bit concerned that they would introduce a vulnerability into the feedosphere. They would add another man-in-the-middle into your hosting scenario and if any component failed then you’re offline. Now your reliability is a function of the weakest link in the chain.
Sometimes though crisis is opportunity. Last month it dawned on me that if FeedBurner did it right that they could actually double the reliability of the feedosphere. All they would need to do is add a simple DNS trick that redirects the user back to the source feed if they have a critical system outage. (they would of course need to have separate and reliable DNS).
One of the capabilities we are very excited to roll out in Q1 will be something we are calling Feed Insurance. We have been laying the groundwork for geo-redundancy (multiple hosting facilities that can pick up the slack if one facility goes down). Hat tip to Kevin Burton for an idea he presented to us as a very nifty spin on feed availability. Kevin’s suggestion was to have a separate facility that just redirects feed requests to the publisher’s source feed if anything catastrophic happens to FeedBurner’s hosting network.
I think now the issue becomes more of why you wouldn’t want to use FeedBurner. If you’re on a hosting provider that might have stability problems in the future (and lets be honest – that’s everyone) then you might want to consider switching to FeedBurner and double your reliability.
I originally talked about this when I was a guest on Om and Niall podsessions.
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Trackback on Jan 7th, 2006 at 3:40 am
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January 6, 2006 at 11:37 am
Y’know, it’d be reasonably rudimentary for FeedBurner to provide ‘power users’ with a PHP file that can be hosted on the local site that does caching and serving of the feed.. and if FeedBurner goes down, it simply serves the latest version from the cache. Surprised they don’t do this, as we do and it both reduces our traffic and increases reliability for users.
January 6, 2006 at 11:49 am
Yeah. That’s true. Though they’d be forced to support the script and so forth.
Probably easier to buy bandwidth then spend the engineering time doing updates.
Good point though.
January 6, 2006 at 12:52 pm
Just a quick thing to make sure everybody realizes. This is something we’re implementing in Q1, and it’s not in production yet. We’ll definitely announce when this is complete and fully operational. There are a bunch of edge cases to deal with that always make these things take longer than you’d like!