[olug] PayPal outage

[Ben Dinger]

In short, PayPal obviously has poor planning and testing.  It really scares me that large companies such as this are so terribly lax in their testing methods.  For example, any production website change I make at work is tested internally for at least two weeks (usually 6) before going "live".  No matter what the size of the site, proper testing is always both a must, and a option. 

Also, trust them with your money?  I wouldn't.  Remember, many banking laws - including FDIC - do not apply to PayPal as they *aren't considered a bank*. 



On Wed, Oct 13, 2004 at 09:10:05PM -0500, William Haisch wrote:
> According to netcraft.com:
> 
> "Paypal began experiencing performance problems Friday after a redesign 
> and code revision destabilized its site performance. Company press reps 
> have said that while eBay's infrastructure allows site changes to be 
> rolled back, Paypal's does not. Paypal is powered by an Apache web 
> server on Linux, while eBay runs on Windows Server 2003."
> 
> Just wait:  in a month, all the trade rags will say Windows rules and 
> Linux is not enterprise ready because of this outage at PayPal.  So 
> this begs the question:  When running Linux and Apache in an enterprise 
> environment, is it true that changes on Linux can't be rolled back or 
> reversed?  Is this a matter of planning and setup or a true limitation 
> of the platform?  Does this mean that PayPal doesn't know what its 
> doing?  Should I trust them with my money?
> 
> P.S.  Listened to the interview of attorney David Boies today on NPR.  
> He busted Microsoft lying during its anti-trust case with the 
> government.  They [MS] had spliced together different, similar looking 
> desktop videos to trying to show that Windows, IE, and Office work best 
> together and would not work if they were separated.  Some researchers 
> from Stanford took screen shots of the video and saw that some programs 
> came and went magically.  Its a good listen.  This begs the question:  
> should I trust my data with a shady company that lies to its customers?
> 
> -Wm.
> William Haisch
> bill at whaisch.com
> 
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-- 
Ben Dinger
ben at mac-geek.com
"The Pope?  How many divisions has he got?" --Josef Stalin