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> build more horrible, unsustainable, overpriced, insecure and failing infrastructures and services This is a bit too much. I'm not saying that Fortune 500 co

> build more horrible, unsustainable, overpriced, insecure and failing infrastructures and services This is a bit too much. I'm not saying that Fortune 500 companies should use DO, but I don't see what's wrong with having a couple of servers for your 50k visitors per month web-app. Sure "do-it-right" will be hard, but with DO you can literally buy yourself more time until you are able to hire the right people to do that.

kbenson 10y ago
> I don't see what's wrong with having a couple of servers for your 50k visitors per month web-app. It's about context. Your 50k visitor a month webapp doesn't need a load balancer. When you actually need a load balancer, chances are you need someone to deal with myriad other reliability concerns as well.
- kalmi10 10y ago
  Well, if you are using VMs and the site cannot afford to go down, then the 50k visitor site does need a cloud load balancer. Individuals VMs can fail anytime. These cloud load balancers can be a part of your HA solution, but yeah.. one also needs to make all other parts of the infrastructure HA (or at least HA-friendly) for this to work as expected, which is not necessarily a simple feat. I hate being woken at night by emergency calls, so I would prefer to set everyone and everything up with HA solutions.
reednj 10y ago
I have a 100k / month web app, and I have one $10 server for the app, and one for the db on DO. Based off the CPU + disk usage, I'd say I could grow 4x and stay with the same setup. It will be a lonngg time before I need a load balancer. Either my workload is atypical or people massively overestimate the server power they need.
- bigiain 10y ago
  Except when either your app server or db server go down on a Friday night (sods law implies this will happen on a weekend you're heading out of town). Now your 100k/month platform is down for 3 days. You've saved something like $40/month (two additional app/db vms plus a load balancer), but a failure could realistically cost you 1/10th of a month of downtime (which, simplistically looks like $10k). Do you think your platform with two single points of failure is _not_ going to go down like this sometime in the next 5 years? (Of course, a weekend's worth of downtime might not be a 10% revenue hit - but depending on your SLAs and penalties it's also possible to be a lot more than that...)
- vacri 10y ago
  This is like driving around a $100k car with zero insurance. You might be the best driver in the world, but...

kbenson 10y ago

> I don't see what's wrong with having a couple of servers for your 50k visitors per month web-app. It's about context. Your 50k visitor a month webapp doesn't need a load balancer. When you actually need a load balancer, chances are you need someone to deal with myriad other reliability concerns as well.

kalmi10 10y ago
Well, if you are using VMs and the site cannot afford to go down, then the 50k visitor site does need a cloud load balancer. Individuals VMs can fail anytime. These cloud load balancers can be a part of your HA solution, but yeah.. one also needs to make all other parts of the infrastructure HA (or at least HA-friendly) for this to work as expected, which is not necessarily a simple feat. I hate being woken at night by emergency calls, so I would prefer to set everyone and everything up with HA solutions.

reednj 10y ago

I have a 100k / month web app, and I have one $10 server for the app, and one for the db on DO. Based off the CPU + disk usage, I'd say I could grow 4x and stay with the same setup. It will be a lonngg time before I need a load balancer. Either my workload is atypical or people massively overestimate the server power they need.

bigiain 10y ago
Except when either your app server or db server go down on a Friday night (sods law implies this will happen on a weekend you're heading out of town). Now your 100k/month platform is down for 3 days. You've saved something like $40/month (two additional app/db vms plus a load balancer), but a failure could realistically cost you 1/10th of a month of downtime (which, simplistically looks like $10k). Do you think your platform with two single points of failure is _not_ going to go down like this sometime in the next 5 years? (Of course, a weekend's worth of downtime might not be a 10% revenue hit - but depending on your SLAs and penalties it's also possible to be a lot more than that...)
vacri 10y ago
This is like driving around a $100k car with zero insurance. You might be the best driver in the world, but...