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No, it doesn't. Whether you're talking about a new Twitter or Reddit, which used to go down all the time (like, constantly), or some business startup, a downti

No, it doesn't. Whether you're talking about a new Twitter or Reddit, which used to go down all the time (like, constantly), or some business startup, a downtime of 30 mins or so no-one really cares about, in my experience. At worst you'll get a phone call or two, a few emails, but if you handle them compassionately you'll be fine. You can run a startup serving thousands or tens of thousands of customers on a single server, with no micro services, a simple server-side MVC setup and never have a $600 a year dedicated server even break 15% CPU. I once took down a server by flooding the email server with error emails, which generated more error emails, which ran out of disk space, etc., etc. Took an hour to get the site up again. Barely a blip in revenue. Client finally coughed up for proper email hosting rather than running their own server on the same box as their site, as I'd been advising them for 4 years.

mayank 8y ago
> You can run a startup serving thousands or tens of thousands of customers on a single server, with no micro services, a simple server-side MVC setup and never have a $600 a year dedicated server even break 15% CPU. This is a gross over-generalization. There are many kinds of problems in computing that can be approached by a startup AND which require large amounts of compute. The soup du jour is machine learning problems. As for downtime, OP has a perfectly valid point. If you're building a B2B application, the customer has already taken a risk on you. If you go down in the middle of a busy workday, even for 30 minutes, you can be damned sure that someone at your client is getting some heat for taking that risk rather than going with $BIG_CO.
- mattmanser 8y ago
  Not really, most people hate $BIG_CO, they're invested, they're invested in your trendy brand, your lovely UI vs the lotus notes style $BIG_CO. The early adopters are going to give you slack. As for the tiny number of startups solving ML business problems, compared to the thousands of web apps launched daily on product hunt, if your USP is computing power and special tech, then obviously this advice does not apply. Edit: You should really disclose you work on AWS when discussing this sort of stuff
  - mayank 8y ago
    I don't work at AWS any longer, not that it's relevant.
  - hombre_fatal 8y ago
    > Edit: You should really disclose you work on AWS when discussing this sort of stuff Yikes. Is this irrelevant attempt to disarm them why we have these obnoxious "disclaimers" all over HN? It's an absolutely meaningless gesture.
hombre_fatal 8y ago
> Whether you're talking about a new Twitter or Reddit You're imagining the inconsequential downtime of Twitter or Reddit instead of a small B2B company trying to hook its first customers.

mayank 8y ago

> You can run a startup serving thousands or tens of thousands of customers on a single server, with no micro services, a simple server-side MVC setup and never have a $600 a year dedicated server even break 15% CPU. This is a gross over-generalization. There are many kinds of problems in computing that can be approached by a startup AND which require large amounts of compute. The soup du jour is machine learning problems. As for downtime, OP has a perfectly valid point. If you're building a B2B application, the customer has already taken a risk on you. If you go down in the middle of a busy workday, even for 30 minutes, you can be damned sure that someone at your client is getting some heat for taking that risk rather than going with $BIG_CO.

mattmanser 8y ago
Not really, most people hate $BIG_CO, they're invested, they're invested in your trendy brand, your lovely UI vs the lotus notes style $BIG_CO. The early adopters are going to give you slack. As for the tiny number of startups solving ML business problems, compared to the thousands of web apps launched daily on product hunt, if your USP is computing power and special tech, then obviously this advice does not apply. Edit: You should really disclose you work on AWS when discussing this sort of stuff
- mayank 8y ago
  I don't work at AWS any longer, not that it's relevant.
- hombre_fatal 8y ago
  > Edit: You should really disclose you work on AWS when discussing this sort of stuff Yikes. Is this irrelevant attempt to disarm them why we have these obnoxious "disclaimers" all over HN? It's an absolutely meaningless gesture.

hombre_fatal 8y ago

> Whether you're talking about a new Twitter or Reddit You're imagining the inconsequential downtime of Twitter or Reddit instead of a small B2B company trying to hook its first customers.