Big server failures get a lot of press. Bad press. While customers expect their data to be absolutely safe, there’s no way to do that. What you can do is make server-stored data safer. A lot safer. Before delving into methods of safeguarding server data, let’s take a look at some highly visible events just this year where servers crashed, data was lost, and the results were not pretty.

1. October 10, 2009. T-Mobile Sidekick owners found that they’d lost their contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists and photos when Microsoft subsidiary Danger suffered a technical glitch. At first, the news was very bad. The lost data looked unrecoverable. Then, it looked like some of the data might be recovered. Then most. If you are or were a T-Mobile Sidekick user, what would you be thinking about the service right now?

2. September 24, 2009. Google’s Gmail blows up, again. Only a “few” users are affected, but it’s the fourth time in two years that Gmail has made the news because of service loss.

3. September 6, 2009. Twitter fails for hours. Sure the Twitter Fail Whale shows up regularly, but Twitter is a high flyer with huge visibility.

4. August 3, 2009. eBay’s PayPal crashes for five hours. PayPal loses millions of dollars in transactions that don’t happen. PayPal’s merchant customers lose more.

5. June 29, 2009. Rackspace loses power in its Dallas data center and ends up rebating customers millions of dollars in usage credits for lost service.

6. January 6, 2009. Salesforce.com’s servers crash for about half an hour. One blogger notes: “Salesforce demonstrates how (un)reliable SaaS really is.”

This sort of press is a server provider’s worst nightmare. One of the missions of this blog will be to propose approaches to improving server reliability. Please feel free to contribute your ideas.