You really know how to belittle the impact of downtime. Most organizations, such as Amazon, which faced a similar downtime this summer, issue responses like, “any amount of downtime is unacceptable,” and humbly apologize to their users and community. They issue a public and transparent plan of action to avoid such outages.

I see no such response from you, just a lot of dodging the issue and passing the blame. This problem wasn’t isolated to just me, as you can see that Afarensis also noticed it as did Razib. We’re savvy enough to have found the papers we were looking for… but what about all those DOI links that resolve thru plos.org, i.e. such as the ones archived thru researchblogging.org? You really think that the impact was negligible?

Kambiz

Now I see FriendFeed has been down for a while… ;-)

I am the total online maniac and I was not online. An alert reader told me that PLoS Blog could not be reached. I alerted the HQ but they were already dealing with it and the problem was much more serious than non-payment and it was not on our side. I opened PLoS ONE easily and opened a couple of papers easily. Ads/banners were off, the homepage of PLoS.org was off, the blog was off and some internal invisible pages were down. Only a tiny sliver of traffic to papers comes through the front page or blog – they most come through individual links. I have looked around and you were the only person trying to get a paper at the time, at least by using DOI-resolution as a method. And even you found the paper within minutes by switching to an alternative method – which is what redundancy in the system is for: it is designed to enable you to get to the papers even if one of the methods is temporarily unavailable.

And I disagree, this downtime does have something to do with open access. If the site is down, how open is the access if people can’t read the content? A similar analogy could be made to old fashion libraries. They are more or less open access institutions, but should the library not pay the electric bills and the computers that handle checkout system don’t work — how open is the access?

The problem also was more deep than two parts of the plos.org online footprint. I mentioned in my second paragraph of the post, the pages that were down were not just the homepage and blog but every DOI link that referred to a PLoS paper, since the DOIs resolve thru plos.org. If anyone on that day clicked a PLoS DOI link they’d see that page. You know better than me how many papers the PLoS journals have published, but effectively thousands of DOIs did not resolve because the PLoS domain wasn’t renewed.

One last thing, Bora. This was a PLoS problem, not a DNS problem. I’ll say it a million times, if the domain was renewed before the expiration date there would have been no downtime. Who’s responsible for paying the renewal fees of plos.org? PLoS is, of course!

Kambiz