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We think central hubs are great -- till they fail. We are always shocked when they fail, but shouldn't be. We expect perfection from a single entity. We can't.

We think central hubs are great -- till they fail. We are always shocked when they fail, but shouldn't be. We expect perfection from a single entity. We can't. Maybe it's time to change our focus.

pyre 16y ago
The bonus of a single entity is that they can afford to hire experts to solve various problems that it wouldn't be feasible for smaller groups to hire/solve. (e.g. Lots of people prefer to have their email done by a provider rather than spend untold amounts of time configuring exim/postfix/qmail/sendmail/etc, in addition to setting up spam filtering, managing blacklists/whitelists/greylists, solving issues when your domain and/or IP ends up on one or more blacklists, etc) Not that I'm necessarily a fan of significantly centralizing things, but for some things I can see the appeal of off-loading the complexity onto someone else.
stoney 16y ago
It's an interesting risk trade off. The central hub is complex but well resourced so able to solve problems quicky (hopefully), self hosting is perhaps a simpler overall solution as it is smaller scale (so less chance of a failure?) but you probably don't have the same man power to deal with a crisis. Which is more likely to suffer an outage? Which is more likely to suffer a long outage? Which is more likely to suffer a fatal outage?
- drusenko 16y ago
  Totally agree. It's incredibly easy to criticize a central hub for any downtime whatsoever because the impact is so large and visible. But your criticism is completely baseless if the average downtime on a central hub is less than the average of a self-hosted solution.
  - mseebach 16y ago
    When your self-hosted blog goes down, it's usually your own fault. I guess that's probably more acceptable to hackers than when it's somebody else's fault, and all you can do is sit and stare at generically worded status updates on Twitter.
    - edanm 16y ago
      True, but to your users, it doesn't matter whose fault it is. What matters is how quickly it gets solved. And I'm only guessing, but these things probably get solved quicker with central hubs. Frustrating, but that's the way it is.
- ErrantX 16y ago
  It's an interesting problem. Here's my (current) example of a problem with central hubs. I had shared hosting with a provider; mistakes and bad management lead them to, basically, kill my account for most of a day - including all my sites. Which sucked. Since then I've been moving to my own VPS's - currently using two shares from Gandi to host sites, provide my own DNS and so on. I actually tried this a while ago and it got bogged down in complexity; now powerdns, nginx et al are much much simpler and it's only taken me a couple of days to roll out. To be honest; I think with cloud services becoming so much cheaper we will see more and more of this - with us relying on "hubs" for our infrastructure rather than our front facing sites.
michael_dorfman 16y ago
Change our focus away from central hubs, or change our focus away from the expectation of perfection?
- electromagnetic 16y ago
  Wordpress being down is an inconvenience, gmail being down is a pain in the ass. I expect better up time out of my email service than out of a blogging service.
jasonkester 16y ago
There's an upside of central hubs too: http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/2008/02/amazon-goes-down-everybody-flips-out.html http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/2008/02/amazon-goes-do... When they fail, it's not your problem. Better still, it fixes itself quickly, without you having to get out of bed at 3am.

We think central hubs are great -- till they fail. We are always shocked when they fail, but shouldn't be. We expect perfection from a single entity. We can't. Maybe it's time to change our focus.

pyre 16y ago

The bonus of a single entity is that they can afford to hire experts to solve various problems that it wouldn't be feasible for smaller groups to hire/solve. (e.g. Lots of people prefer to have their email done by a provider rather than spend untold amounts of time configuring exim/postfix/qmail/sendmail/etc, in addition to setting up spam filtering, managing blacklists/whitelists/greylists, solving issues when your domain and/or IP ends up on one or more blacklists, etc) Not that I'm necessarily a fan of significantly centralizing things, but for some things I can see the appeal of off-loading the complexity onto someone else.

stoney 16y ago

It's an interesting risk trade off. The central hub is complex but well resourced so able to solve problems quicky (hopefully), self hosting is perhaps a simpler overall solution as it is smaller scale (so less chance of a failure?) but you probably don't have the same man power to deal with a crisis. Which is more likely to suffer an outage? Which is more likely to suffer a long outage? Which is more likely to suffer a fatal outage?

drusenko 16y ago
Totally agree. It's incredibly easy to criticize a central hub for any downtime whatsoever because the impact is so large and visible. But your criticism is completely baseless if the average downtime on a central hub is less than the average of a self-hosted solution.
- mseebach 16y ago
  When your self-hosted blog goes down, it's usually your own fault. I guess that's probably more acceptable to hackers than when it's somebody else's fault, and all you can do is sit and stare at generically worded status updates on Twitter.
  - edanm 16y ago
    True, but to your users, it doesn't matter whose fault it is. What matters is how quickly it gets solved. And I'm only guessing, but these things probably get solved quicker with central hubs. Frustrating, but that's the way it is.
ErrantX 16y ago
It's an interesting problem. Here's my (current) example of a problem with central hubs. I had shared hosting with a provider; mistakes and bad management lead them to, basically, kill my account for most of a day - including all my sites. Which sucked. Since then I've been moving to my own VPS's - currently using two shares from Gandi to host sites, provide my own DNS and so on. I actually tried this a while ago and it got bogged down in complexity; now powerdns, nginx et al are much much simpler and it's only taken me a couple of days to roll out. To be honest; I think with cloud services becoming so much cheaper we will see more and more of this - with us relying on "hubs" for our infrastructure rather than our front facing sites.

michael_dorfman 16y ago

Change our focus away from central hubs, or change our focus away from the expectation of perfection?

electromagnetic 16y ago
Wordpress being down is an inconvenience, gmail being down is a pain in the ass. I expect better up time out of my email service than out of a blogging service.

jasonkester 16y ago

There's an upside of central hubs too: http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/2008/02/amazon-goes-down-everybody-flips-out.html http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/2008/02/amazon-goes-do... When they fail, it's not your problem. Better still, it fixes itself quickly, without you having to get out of bed at 3am.