The woman who lost her online business when all content was deleted from the cloud

After a decade of hard work, Natalie Brown had turned her blog into a thriving business.

And suddenly all the content disappeared.

“I felt awful. Little by little I realized that she had just vanished ”, says Brown, a parenting blogger and author of Confessions of a Crummy Mummy (“Confessions of a bad mother”).

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The content was hosted by Gridhost, a cloud internet provider that shut down in November. Brown did not receive advance notice about being shut down because his blog was created by a third-party company that had gone out of business.

And I also had no access to the blog’s backup, since Gridhost also hosted it in the cloud.

Days of stress and many tears followed.

Difficult to recover content

Cloud computing – storing information and software in remote data centers and accessing it over the Internet – is becoming increasingly popular.

Cloud computing companies like AWS have seen explosive growth in recent years. (Getty/)

It allows small businesses, for example, to set up email or data processing facilities without having to operate their own technology infrastructure.

But when things go wrong, the consequences can be dire.

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Cloud services may experience intermittent interruptions or total blackouts caused by technical failures, cyberattacks or even lightning.

In Brown’s case, his blog is a direct source of income. Companies that make mom products pay you to promote them or post certain content on her blog.

“It literally puts food on our table.” Brown assures.

He explains that the owner of Gridhost, the company tsoHost, did not allow him access to his blog data and was only able to recover it after asking his former web developer for help. “He said it took him about six hours to negotiate with them,” he recalls.

Now the blog is live again on another platform and Brown has backed it up with an independent provider.

A tsoHost spokesperson announced that the company attempted to contact customers prior to Gridhost’s shutdown, adding: “We understand the decision to retire the Gridhost platform is disappointing, and tsoHost works closely with customers to assist with migrations”.

The face and the cross of the cloud

Using cloud services, by definition, makes a business dependent on a third party, says Vili Lehdonvirta of the Oxford Internet Institute and author of Cloud Empires (“Empires of the Cloud”).

Businesses become dependent on their cloud computing provider, says author Vili Lehdonvirta. (JOHN CAIRNS/)

“What is the cloud? Well, the cloud is someone else’s computer.” it states.

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And glitches in the clouds are not unusual. Amazon Web Services, the world’s largest cloud provider, suffered a partial outage in December 2021 that affected thousands of customers.

Also, sometimes cloud services are suspended, as is the case with Gridhost. Google will retire its IoT Core cloud platform next August. People used it to connect their smart home devices, among other things.

According to data from the consulting firm Uptime Institute, while the cloud is not becoming less reliable in general, costly outages are more common.

“Over 60% of failures result in at least $100,000 in total losses, a substantial 39% increase over 2019”indicates the entity.

Kristina McElheran of the University of Toronto says cloud computing is becoming more popular with businesses.

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She and her colleagues conduct regular large-scale surveys of hundreds of thousands of US companies. Citing other research, she also notes that the shift to remote work during the pandemic has further accelerated cloud adoption.

“The cloud changes the rules of the game for the survival, growth and productivity of young people, especially young and small”explains Dr. McElheran, referring to start-ups. “But this is where the other side of the coin is: they lose control.”

Other affected business

Pokey Bolton lost bookings for their workshops due to an outage from their cloud provider. (INDIGO PEREZ /)

The small business owner who knows this all too well is Pokey Bolton, an artist and event planner in Napa Valley, California.

In early December 2022 their cloud email provider, Rackspace, suffered a ransomware attack that affected thousands of customers.

“I’m furious”, He says. It came at a particularly tricky time, because early December is when Bolton tends to get plenty of bookings for its annual January craft workshops.

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“That is my great source of money, it is key to my business”the Mint.

She was expecting hundreds of people to sign up, but with no email access for several days, she’s not sure how many customers she’s lost this year.

Bolton switched email providers and says he tried to close his Rackspace account, but received no written confirmation. He also doesn’t know if the hackers accessed his email accounts, which contained some customer data and other confidential information.

A Rackspace spokeswoman said the company was able to help more than three-quarters of affected customers set up new email services on another platform. “We are proactively reaching out individually to those who still need assistance”he added.

Professor Lehdonvirta, for his part, stresses the importance of appreciating the benefits of cloud computing, particularly in terms of uptime, a term that indicates how long a computer system runs without fail.

“Despite these major disruptions (cloud providers) can offer amazing uptimesvery difficult to achieve in a smaller-scale operation,” he explains.

Plus, software running in the cloud can receive the latest updates instantly, helping keep you secure.

Source: Elcomercio