Last week I thought the world was coming to an end. I’m talking about pre FrankenSuperSandyStorm, to be clear. I’m referring to last week when Amazon Web Services went down and it broke the Internet.
Chances are you were affected in some way. Certainly if you’re a user of Voice123 you were affected. For nearly two days! Perhaps your own personal web site was down or you experienced the outage in some other capacity. A day without Flipboard was really hard for me. I was going through withdrawals!
I recall, maybe a month or so before that, GoDaddy had an outage. That had a significant impact as well. Twitter was flooded with voice actors who were upset because their business sites were down and they had no access to their email.
When you’re a solopreneur, you can’t afford downtime like that. Each day without email is missed opportunity and money out of your pocket.
Delivering Audio
For a number of years I used FTP to deliver my audio. My hosting package allows me unlimited bandwidth and storage for transfers, so it was really convenient. But that was a few years ago. The longer I do this, and the more new clients I work with, the more I realize that a lot of people don’t even know what FTP is anymore. It just wasn’t a great option for me anymore because people weren’t familiar with it or how to use it.
This year, I started using Dropbox to deliver most of my audio. It’s quick. It’s easy. Perhaps most important, it’s very user friendly.
I also like Dropbox because it’s reliable. Most of the time.
Today I had audio to deliver to two different clients. I uploaded the files to Dropbox, sent them access to the folders, and waited for them to download. An hour passed. Neither had accessed the audio. Keep in mind, both of them were in a bit of a hurry. Another hour passed. Still nothing.
I sent follow up emails to both clients. Both of them replied the same. They couldn’t get in. Dropbox was down!
Fortunately both of the clients were able to receive large files by email. I was able to attach the audio and send it that way. But that isn’t always an option!
What’s Your Backup Plan?
If the file is too large to email and your other delivery method (like Dropbox) is down, do you have a backup plan in place to get the files delivered? All it takes is an outage like the AWS one or the GoDaddy one to pretty much break the Internet. When that happens your clients are still going to want audio and it’s your job to find a way to get it to them.
Here’s a few options you might want to check out.
QUESTION: What service do you use to deliver your audio? Do you have a backup plan if it breaks?
