After Sandy, Manual Labor Keeps Cloud Services Running

The whole point about cloud computing services that live on servers that customers never see, never touch, never think about is exactly that. The physical infrastructure is out of sight, out of mind, and customers focus on running their applications and using the services they provide. But when disaster hits, when power fails followed by backup power failing, things get serious and physical rather quickly. That has been the case with Squarespace, an upstart Web site creation and hosting company based in New York. It has hosted its infrastructure with Peer1, one of a handful of companies affected by the flooding at 75 Broad Street. The short version of the story is that after backup generators kicked in, flooding overwhelmed the fuel pump.