One of the major problems with OpenID is that if your OpenID provider is down, or you can’t recover your passowrd with it you can’t access all the sites that authenticate you by your OpenID identity.
The obvious solution is configuring delegate, though it requires you to have a web site, hosted either for free or for a couple of bucks. Though what if your hosting company will experience network outage or you’ll have scheduled downtime? Yes, you will be unable to use your identity.
A funny solution came to my mind this morning. Amazon S3 is known to be a quite reliable infrastructure for hosting static assets. For literally cents per month you can put HTML file to your bucket that will delegate to any OpenID provider. Your current OpenID provider is down? No problem, just update your HTML to use another provider until your primary choice will recover.
What is also nice is that Amazon S3 has a support of CNAME aliases, which will enable you to use a domain name of your choice to act as your identity (well, in fact it seems that it will be a bit more longer, like bucketname.mydomainname.com or bucketname.id.mydomainname.com or something like this).
The downside of this method that it is still not free, though since I don’t see any reason for heavy traffic targeting your identity delegation page your costs shouldn’t exceed a couple of cents per month.
I haven’t tried this method yet, but once I’ll get a chance, I’ll definitely try.
