Humyo cloud disappears from afternoon sky
Europe's largest online storage provider, Humyo, has been offline all afternoon due to a multi-terabyte database rebuild.
Humyo is an online, "store-your-data-in-the-cloud" service that was started up by Dan Conlon in January 2007. It has more than 300,000 customers using its facilities.
Conlon funded it himself using money he made when sold his hosting company, DonHost, to Pipex in a £5.9m deal in September 2004. Conlon then spent two years as MD of Pipex Hosting before leaving to start something up again. A few days ago the company announced a $1.15m investment from other investors to fund expansion from its current operations in the UK and Germany.
Users see Humyo as just another drive to which they can drag and drop files. Unfortunately, when it isn't there, neither is their data. Although Humyo encrypts user data and keeps it in a data centre in a former bullion vault that's all very well, the vital thing is that the bloody data centre is available, 24 by 7, all the time, every second of every day, just like a local hard drive. When it isn't, then the whole cloud storage proposition goes tits up in a major way.
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