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A way for startups to build a solid IT infrastructure (2017)
- j7k6 7y ago> [...], we use a private mail server. I will always recommend against running your own mail infrastructure. The administrative expense is to high in the long run. Unless you want to employ a 24/7 on-call admin team, Office365 is always the better choice. Email encryption can still be done client side (SMIME/PGP).
- arethuza 7y ago"running your own mail infrastructure" - I once got responsibility for a complex email nightmare dumped on me (tens of thousands of users, hundreds of domains, hundreds of servers) and I had no idea the vast number of entertaining ways email infrastructure can be screwed up. Mind you - I guess at a small scale it might be OK - but infrastructure like email is both vital and utterly thankless. Let someone else do it.....
- PostPost 7y agoStill have nightmares from my first job in help desk, sweating bullets while handling decades of Outlook .pst files for a C-level in my company. Only place they existed were on the laptop itself, and a cheap 250GB external drive. Email sucks.
- arethuza 7y agoI still remember the conversation with a senior IT support guy who had been sent my way by the CIO - "<boss> says to speak to you as email is broken". "How much of it is broken?", "All of it".... The cheap VM running sendmail with 12,000 entries in its alias file was being DOSed.... That was my introduction to crappy large email systems!
- hedvig 7y agoI think there should be a question of if the C-level needs or even has made recent searches on any of that email going back past 7 years.
- PostPost 7y agoI asked them that directly (it was a tiny company and I was like 20) and the answer was no, but that they wanted to hold onto them in the event they needed to look up old contract info. Looking back, I should have suggested backing it up to network storage. I imagine it must have been stressful traveling or going through TSA and worrying about losing 20 years of email data.
- dano 7y agoI agree that one should not host their own mail server these days, however, do the business, clients, and employees a favor and evaluate something in other than Outlook and Exchange based email systems.
- diminoten 7y agoWhat's wrong with Office 365?
- Ascetik 7y agoI agree, there are tons of good options out there, such as ProtonMail or others. As a sysadmin, who no longer works in the MSP world, managing Exchange was such a huge time-sink. There is reason basically every MSP who is worth their salt will migrate their clients to O365 or some other solution. It works. There is relatively little down time. And you barely have to manage it. It's a win-win for everyone.
- lwhalen 7y agoI've been running email servers for my personal and business email for nigh on two decades now. It's "an hour or two of maintenance a quarter", on average, and is nowhere near as big of a deal as many would make it out to be. Is it 100% perfect? Certainly not. Would it be 'easier' (FSVO) to just give my email to gmail/O365/fastmail? Probably. However, I feel "the net" was meant to be (and works best as) a series of decentralized systems. Feeding my data into a 'just this side of a walled-garden' ecosystem does not help the net, so I don't do it.
- Roark66 7y agoI only skimmed the article, so perhaps I missed it, but it seems there is no mention of any central user authentication/authorisation solution or personal certificate storage like Active Directory. Every IT infrastructure that is expected to scale beyond few users has to include a component like this to manage users, their certificates(or keys), access rights etc.
- peterwwillis 7y agoAnd they're missing a ticketing system, a CRM, a wiki, an inventory database, etc, to say nothing of the actual computing infrastructure. It's kind of insane to run a business on free software. If your CalDAV server suddenly has a bug with a partner who uses Apple/Windows/etc calendar, what are you gonna do? Drop everything else to start debugging? Call and tell them to switch calendars for you? Abandon them?
- loudmax 7y agoAttitudes like this are what leads to systematic vendor lock-in and monopolies. If an open source system can't communicate with a proprietary system, the bug is one of these systems not following open standards.
- module0000 7y agoI get your stance - but this is about a company trying to make money. If anything(such as avoiding vendor lock-in) gets in the way of you making money, then your venture is failing. Card carrying FSF member here, but business is business.
- _frkl 7y agoI don't know, not for me. I still think it's possible to think of your business also as a political statement. Sure, you have to be prepared to 'pay' for your conviction, and possibly fail because of it. Which does not seem to make sense or be acceptable to a lot of folk. It is for me though.
- gregoryexe 7y agoJust buy a couple Synology's, that will get you 90% there.
- naasking 7y agoYou're being downvoted, but for small businesses Synology is pretty good. They now even come with Docker, full virtualization and Active Directory built-in, and they've had clustering and easy automated failover for years now. You pay a bit of a premium, but it does make it easy.
- jermaustin1 7y agoI just heard of this because of your comment, these little servers seem like a good deal for not having to do anything yourself really, especially for under 2000USD.
- tvanantwerp 7y agoIf you're not paying in cash, you're paying in time and attention it takes to manage everything yourself. I would never recommend that a start-up self host email or very much else. This is a list of things to distract your team from focusing on building product and selling it.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y agoYeah, I kind of assumed that the answer would be to solve your problems with office 365 or something similar and then move onto actually producing yourself.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Retric 7y agoIt’s a question of risk and cash flow. Internal IT infrastructure can represent far lower burn rates which may be an excellent tradeoff or a poor one based on several factors. Are you spending your personal savings or a 100 million dollar funding round, etc.
- jupp0r 7y agoIf $5/(user * month) for google suite is imposing cash flow problems then you should fix that rather than spend your time administering your own email server.
- Retric 7y agoEmail is unlikely to be the only service you need. Add github and your at 14$ a month per person. Keep going and it really does add up fairly quickly.
- gumby 7y agoFWIW (this is merely a single example): my current company (which includes two ex googlers among the five founders) specifically uses no google infrastructure (no gmail, no google docs, no cloud, photos, hangout etc). Actually I exaggerate: three of us use google search. Edit: Someone asked why but their comment was downvoted dead so I am amending my comment. There were three reasons; privacy, features, and dependability. The privacy one is well discussed elsewhere. Apart from paranoia (won't get into that), there are UX issues. For example on the shared google docs for our local Boy Scout troop I've seen patient's files accidentally shared by physicians, internal corporate documents from some Fortune 50 companies and the like. Clearly nobody shared those on purpose! For features: we certainly don't want to build a dependency on chrome (the new IE). One of the team had to move a google acquisition from AWS to gcp and swore never to use the latter again. Gmail doesn't follow standards (e.g. IMAP, adding AMP to mail)...the reasons go on. many products simply aren't best in class (e.g. zoom works much better for us than hangouts); others are (google docs / sheets may not be best-in-features but seem to have the best simultaneous editing, better than Apple or Nextcloud/Collabra when the network is flakey) For dependability: one is of course products and features getting randomly cancelled. The other is cases where one account gets cancelled and it wipes out all connected features. These stories are scary; some have appeared on HN. All in all it's not worth the risks.
- holychiz 7y agoI'm with the majority of the comments here. It seems an expensive way to run your business. Initial cost is usually a small part of the overall TCO. This post was written in 2017, any updates on their experience with this infrastructure? Prove us doubters wrong.
- teddyh 7y ago“If it’s a core business function — do it yourself, no matter what.” — Joel Spolsky, In Defense of Not-Invented-Here Syndrome: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/14/in-defense-of-not-invented-here-syndrome/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/14/in-defense-of-not-...
- jupp0r 7y agoImplementing your own email/file sync/identity server sounds like great advice for any startup to get going. In your in-house programming language, of course.
- teddyh 7y agoI believe you are being insincere and/or sarcastic. This does not help, and it would have been more useful to make actual arguments.
- diminoten 7y agoIt is an actual argument, he's saying that your application of this phrase makes no sense here. Are you suggesting startups write their own email server?!?!
- teddyh 7y agoIf they’re offering e-mail as a service to customers, and trying to differentiate by the features of that service, then probably yes. Otherwise, probably not. Read the linked post to get a more nuanced view of what Joel considers being a “core business function”.
- diminoten 7y agoThey're not, no one is talking about that except you. You're completely off topic. This is about startups hosting their own internal IT infrastructure.
- relaunched 7y agoIt feels a bit like it misunderstands what IT infrastructure is all about. Identity and Access Management is noticeably missing AND core to IT infrastructure.
- Aaronstotle 7y agoI'm very surprised to see that they chose Arch Linux for their base OS, very curious to see if that ever lead to issues over the last two years.