I wrote an article on my SEOMoz blog about how if you were smart you’d Outsource Your Business. Do I feel stupid as we watch a major player screw up the most important cyber shopping day of the year for 25,000 merchants?

Nope.

Look, without Yahoo (or someone like them) let’s say 80% of those people wouldn’t be on the internet with anything but a (shudder) 1&1 hosted brochureware site with an 800#. Not that there is anything wrong with that.

Floods happen - does everyone leave Louisiana? Earthquakes in California. Hurricanes in FL.

It’s not going to get a lot of press, but I’m sure thousands of small shared servers in places like RackSpace, CariNet, Verisign, GoDaddy, etc went down today too. I bet just as many individual merchants lost their stores on the thousands of small hosting companies as did on Yahoo.

I would still argue that, on a risk management basis, you are better off trusting someone like Yahoo to do for you than you are trying to do it yourself. You gonna get a server, a dedicated RoadRunner line, etc and do your own hosting?

No, of course not.

Let me just say that maybe Yahoo could have done a better job - we don’t know what happened yet - but I’m sure they were paying attention to the problem, which is certainly more than most businesses could do.

We recently decided to launch a new product on a non-redundant server because we’re pretty sure demand is going to ramp pretty fast and we’ll need to move it up to a much larger set of multi-processor boards with dedicated hardware firewall connections. Those will have redundant power supplies and the full raid and NAS backup. So we’ve decided to take the risk of an early life failure around launch to save $50K.

If we’re wrong we’ll learn from the mistake but we won’t feel like we made the mistake by misunderestimating the situation. I know the small merchants at Yahoo are feeling the pain, but they weren’t wrong to outsource to a major vendor. And most can’t afford a contingency plan, so they are not wrong to not have one.

I think this falls under my Grandfather’s category of “I bet that hurt. Pull your socks up and get on with it.”