Digg Preps Disaster Recovery Site

Digg is preparing a disaster recovery data center that will allow the company's IT team to quickly restore the site in the event that a disaster or network event knocks the primary data center offline. The announcement followed several hours of downtime after a planned site maintenance outage took longer than expected.

"We've been working for several months on a full Disaster Recovery site for Digg," co-founder Kevin Rose wrote on the Digg blog. "Once operational, our DR site will let us make site updates without interruptions - and in tonight's case where things went haywire, you'd never know we were making updates at all."

That's an important goal for Digg users, some of whom tracked the downtime and some of whom expressed their distress - and naturally blogged about it and submitted the URL to Digg as soon as it came back online.

Digg houses its web servers at Equinix, a leading provider of network-neutral data centers and Internet exchange services. As traffic has scaled up, Digg has benefitted from Equinix' peering infrastructure, which offers "immediate access to every major global network for the most efficient delivery of content to end-users." Digg is housed in one of the company's Silicon Valley data centers (Equinix doesn't say which, remember the Fight Club rule).

Equinix has sturdy data centers that are located throughout the country, which should make it relatively simple for Digg to establish backup operations in another location. Companies seeking a disaster recovery solution typically locate their backup servers a significant distance from the primary data center, so a single major disaster (such as an earthquake in California) won't knock both sites offline.

Digg and Equinix have a shared lineage. Jay Adelson was the founder and chief technology officer at Equinix as it built its network and reputation. Adelson then joined with Rose to co-found Digg, which has quickly become one of the web's most popular destinations.

Oddly, Digg uses a proxy registration service, Go Daddy's Domains by Proxy, Inc., to conceal the registrant information for digg.com and its other domains. It's somewhat unusual to see proxy registration for corporate sites, which usually seek to build credibility through transparency. Just another sign that Digg doesn't do things the old-fashioned way.