…and then wish they’d read the thread about how scammers sucker them.
At this point, every reader of this thread should stop and read (or re-read) Ray Bradbury’s dystopian futuristic short story The Pedestrian (four pages). Full text here (PDF):
http://www.achsblueenglish.weebly.com/uploads/7/6/7/3/7673592/the_pedestrian.pdf
I’m pretty sure it’s hosted on AWS, but probably not on the East Coast region that was down. I would guess that Discourse client hosting is on the West Coast.
AWS’s main data centers in North America are in Virginia (US-East-1 that was down), Ohio, California and Oregon. There are also a couple of dozen other locations worldwide.
When I run ping boards.straightdope.com from a terminal, I get the IP address 64.71.144.202, which resolves to an ISP called Hurricane Electric, with the server located somewhere in the Los Angeles area.
If true, that would explain why the forums weren’t affected by the AWS outage, because they don’t use AWS. But still … Hurricane Electric is a very odd choice for hosting a site of moderate activity like the SDMB. Certainly not within the first 10, or even 20, web hosts that come to my mind.
Another possibility is that the SDMB has multiple mirrors and I happen to be redirected to the one closest to me (I’m in California). But would the parent company really be funding all those sites, for a board of relative unimportance? 
I get the same IP address. It looks like I was wrong about Discourse being hosted on AWS.
Looking up Hurricane Electric, it seems that they offer wholesale private data centers. So it may be that Discourse runs its hosting from a private data center under the umbrella of Hurricane Electric.
He may be a good predictor for some things, but he has his people watching WESTERNS. HA!
B-b-b-but you mean it’s not really in a cloud?
<ThelmaLou looks skyward, immensely disappointed…>
It’s ok, we can still yell at it.
I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down and still somehow
It’s cloud illusions I recall
I really don’t know clouds at all
H/T to Joni Mitchell
I’m so old I can remember when the prime feature of the internet was fault tolerance. Since then, we’ve let the infrastructure be increasingly centralized into a handful of companies. That was a big mistake.
We need more open protocols, more peer-to-peer communication, and fewer middlemen.
What do these have to do with an AWS outage?
~Max
What do you think AWS is? It’s centralized infrastructure. Every company that uses it is dependent on Amazon to maintain it and keep it running.
There is a push to move a lot of factory automation to the ‘cloud’. Which is either AWS, or Azure, or Google. Won’t it be fun when an AWS or Azure or Google outage shuts down hundreds of factories across the country?
The centralized part made sense. But AWS uses the same HTTPS protocol everyone else uses, and it acts as an endpoint, not a middleman (middlemen would be like, a mail server or VPN).
~Max