Amazon Web Services Went Down Today

My sister told me of her frustration in finding certain information on the internet. She told me how much work she put in digging up the information and how it was too bad that someone didn’t provide a site under said information. “Why don’t we create the site?” I asked her.

We started brain-storming and came up with our idea. I signed up for an Amazon web service. I’m not telling you which one right now because at this point, I want to keep my sister’s and my ideas a secret!

Needless to say, the service going down like that did give me some pause. It also made me think about the design of my site. The whole site will not be on Amazon. The new site will be on my web host and use the Amazon web service in question.  What will happen on my new site if the web service has gone down? I need to take that into consideration.

What information do I cache? Can our users still get some things done on the site if the web service is down?