California might slide into the ocean. Philadelphia might get burried in snow for 4 weeks. This is why we offer mirroring from two data centers, in Pennsylvania and California -- thousands of miles apart, rather than just one.

The reality is that we can't limit our concerns to earthquakes. When 9/11 occurred, it took down all high-speed communications services south of Midtown Manhattan for close to a month, and also prevented access to equipment for relocation for the best part of a week. There are an immense number of disaster scenarios that can put a data center out of business, either temporarily or permanently.

If your web and e-mail services are mission critical to what you do, you should consider the advantages of our remote mirroring designs -- either our simple mirroring Premium service with nominal extra cost, or our Ultra service which keeps you going with MultiPath reliability in the event of catastrophes.

The important things to remember here are two: The first is that once your web site has been running for a year or two, the only extant valid copy of data may be on the web server. Things change, data gets lost on PCs, and PCs break. The second is that if there is a real catastrophe you may not be able to find a sound replacement service rapidly. An extreme example of this is recognition that more than 30% of the world's Internet services originate in California. But there are many individual buildings that originate 1/2% to 1% of the world's Internet services. Loss of any of these could delay reintroduction of service for several weeks as staffs of other companies work overtime to assist people in restoring service.

Remote mirroring also works more reliably day-to-day. Remote mirroring gets rid of almost all the possible common points of failure in a locally mirrored environment (e.g. power, switch failure, etc.). Similarly, remote MultiPathing works a little better than MultiPathing to a single location because there is earlier divergence.