> An absurd recommendation. What did you see as his recommendation? I think he suggested not building generic infrastructure unless needed. That being said, I

> An absurd recommendation. What did you see as his recommendation? I think he suggested not building generic infrastructure unless needed. That being said, I definitely agree with you that you should run with margin and some fault tolerance. Not because you need four-nines availability, but because you're wasting operations' time otherwise. I've fallen into that trap with my first attempt at "start-up": running application hosting (before it was called cloud computing) on minimal hardware that I'd build and physically host myself. As a result I was spending more time on operations than on writing code (including code to automate operations). Shelling at least for additional machines and IPKVM (not to mention for "remote hands" service at a colo or for a managed hosting provider) would have made this much less time consuming.