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> It’s really crazy the myopia I see with posts like this. I said "most startups", not critical medical care. I've dealt with startups for nearly two decades a

by jeswin 7y ago

> It’s really crazy the myopia I see with posts like this. I said "most startups", not critical medical care. I've dealt with startups for nearly two decades and most startups can begin operations without the cloud, and with the possibility of downtime. Even in healthcare there are plenty of systems where varying levels of downtime is acceptable.

scarface74 7y ago
In any small B2B company where your business is based on a few big spenders, uptime is important. If you lose one customer you lose a noticeable share of revenue.
- adrianmsmith 7y ago
  The assumption there is that if you're down, you'll lose the customer. But that depends on the industry. At least in one industry I've worked in (B2B accountancy and reporting software), the product can be down for a day and it doesn't matter. A few employees at the customer are using our software to produce monthly reports, and if they have to wait until the next day to produce the reports, they're annoyed but they can get on with other work in the meantime. I mean, for sure, it's not ideal, and you'll get emails to complain, but so far nobody has cancelled on us due to something like that. I'm not saying I like the product being down, but I can understand the CEO not wanting to pay extra to invest in redundant infrastructure, it's probably the correct business decision.
  - aflag 7y ago
    There were cloud provider outages that lasted a long time as well. They are far from frequent, but it's not like you are immune from it ever happening if you're using aws or gcp. Anyway, I don't think uptime is the main reason to use a cloud provider. For me, the main reason is the ease to expand. You can add and remove infrastructure quite easily. If course, you can do the same in a datacenter, but in my experience it takes planning ahead a bit more than you need with a cloud provider.

by jeswin 7y ago

scarface74 7y ago

In any small B2B company where your business is based on a few big spenders, uptime is important. If you lose one customer you lose a noticeable share of revenue.

adrianmsmith 7y ago
The assumption there is that if you're down, you'll lose the customer. But that depends on the industry. At least in one industry I've worked in (B2B accountancy and reporting software), the product can be down for a day and it doesn't matter. A few employees at the customer are using our software to produce monthly reports, and if they have to wait until the next day to produce the reports, they're annoyed but they can get on with other work in the meantime. I mean, for sure, it's not ideal, and you'll get emails to complain, but so far nobody has cancelled on us due to something like that. I'm not saying I like the product being down, but I can understand the CEO not wanting to pay extra to invest in redundant infrastructure, it's probably the correct business decision.
- aflag 7y ago
  There were cloud provider outages that lasted a long time as well. They are far from frequent, but it's not like you are immune from it ever happening if you're using aws or gcp. Anyway, I don't think uptime is the main reason to use a cloud provider. For me, the main reason is the ease to expand. You can add and remove infrastructure quite easily. If course, you can do the same in a datacenter, but in my experience it takes planning ahead a bit more than you need with a cloud provider.