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Dating site dumps Amazon over outages

Web giant's recent run of outages has prompted one customer to take its business elsewhere.

5 Jul 2012

A US dating site has pulled its website from Amazon's EC2 infrastructure citing "unpredictable datacentre issues".

Online dating-auction site, WhatsYourPrice.com, has decided to switch hosting providers, in light of Amazon's recent run of outages.

WhatsYourPrice.com founder and chief executive, Brandon Wade, said the online dating community is the least forgiving when it comes to downtime.

"Services focused on dating and relationships require constant accessibility," said Wade. "While you can watch a movie tomorrow if you miss it today, dating is all about the serendipity of meeting the right person at the right time. If an online dating service is not available, a user may lose the chance to meet his or her soul mate forever."

He said a previous outage, prior to the one reported by IT Pro this week, on 14 June flooded his dating website with complaints from thousands of members. Wade also claimed that repeated calls to Amazon's support team yielded no response.

Following Amazon's outage last weekend, which took Instagram and Pinterest offline, he decided to permanently move WhatsYourPrice.com to a Las Vegas-based hosting facility.

"Amazon's failure has negatively affected our website's reputation as a reliable online dating destination," said Wade, who was previously an IT infrastructure executive at General Electric.

"100 per cent uptime is a required SLA for anyone providing cloud computing services. Amazon's inability to provide such service levels is the main reason we have decided to quit using AWS EC2 altogether."

IT Pro contacted Amazon for a comment and had received no response at the time of publication.