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Sarcasm detected! There's always going to be pros and cons to every provider, so the obvious choice is host everything on my home theater PC since I never turn

Sarcasm detected! There's always going to be pros and cons to every provider, so the obvious choice is host everything on my home theater PC since I never turn that thing off.

dijit 6y ago
Please don't consider this a counterpoint, but I have had single physically deployed servers that have significantly higher average uptime than my ec2 instances in AWS us-east-1 in the last 5 years. (significantly higher == 100% availability, it hasn't gone down... yet)
- viraptor 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
  - theli0nheart 6y ago
    This doesn't apply. Having a server fail on you doesn't preclude you from posting to HN.
    - viraptor 6y ago
      But it becomes uninteresting, which causes self-censorship. How many times did you hear about someone's server running for 12 minutes? How many times about server running for over a year? Nobody posts about the first one. (Unless it was a spectacular failure for some reason) Similar issue comes with estimating how reliable things are. People are more likely to respond "I had an issue with X too, here's my story" rather than "all good, nothing to report".
- mcqueenjordan 6y ago
  (Not considering as a counterpoint, just want to point this out for whomever.) When (not if) it does go down, however long it takes to replace is downtime that has to be amortized over the entire X years, to get an accurate picture. If it takes > 260 minutes to detect, replace, and fully recover, then you've already blown the four nines budget you "saved up" for the past five years, when amortizing. Side-note from a recent twitter thread: If you're not rigorously monitoring availability (preferably with canaries/probes), it's probably much lower than you think. (Using the royal 'you' here, not pointing any fingers.)
- renewiltord 6y ago
  I actually had a server with uptime in a decade+. Then my provider (Hetzner) decided they wanted to get rid of the hardware. Gave me fair warning and dumped it. I backed everything up and only restored my DNS and MX records from BIND (because I wanted to keep getting mail). Not the database, not the blog theme, nothing. One of these days I gotta do it. Now I host everything on managed services. It was the right decision then, I was broke. Now, though, the cost of having to deal with it is higher.
- TheCoelacanth 6y ago
  That's not at all surprising because shutting down and starting new ec2 instances is expected to be a relatively common occurrence. High availability comes from a load balancer routing traffic to an instance that is currently available, not from having a single instance that just runs forever.

Sarcasm detected! There's always going to be pros and cons to every provider, so the obvious choice is host everything on my home theater PC since I never turn that thing off.

dijit 6y ago

Please don't consider this a counterpoint, but I have had single physically deployed servers that have significantly higher average uptime than my ec2 instances in AWS us-east-1 in the last 5 years. (significantly higher == 100% availability, it hasn't gone down... yet)

viraptor 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
- theli0nheart 6y ago
  This doesn't apply. Having a server fail on you doesn't preclude you from posting to HN.
  - viraptor 6y ago
    But it becomes uninteresting, which causes self-censorship. How many times did you hear about someone's server running for 12 minutes? How many times about server running for over a year? Nobody posts about the first one. (Unless it was a spectacular failure for some reason) Similar issue comes with estimating how reliable things are. People are more likely to respond "I had an issue with X too, here's my story" rather than "all good, nothing to report".
mcqueenjordan 6y ago
(Not considering as a counterpoint, just want to point this out for whomever.) When (not if) it does go down, however long it takes to replace is downtime that has to be amortized over the entire X years, to get an accurate picture. If it takes > 260 minutes to detect, replace, and fully recover, then you've already blown the four nines budget you "saved up" for the past five years, when amortizing. Side-note from a recent twitter thread: If you're not rigorously monitoring availability (preferably with canaries/probes), it's probably much lower than you think. (Using the royal 'you' here, not pointing any fingers.)
renewiltord 6y ago
I actually had a server with uptime in a decade+. Then my provider (Hetzner) decided they wanted to get rid of the hardware. Gave me fair warning and dumped it. I backed everything up and only restored my DNS and MX records from BIND (because I wanted to keep getting mail). Not the database, not the blog theme, nothing. One of these days I gotta do it. Now I host everything on managed services. It was the right decision then, I was broke. Now, though, the cost of having to deal with it is higher.
TheCoelacanth 6y ago
That's not at all surprising because shutting down and starting new ec2 instances is expected to be a relatively common occurrence. High availability comes from a load balancer routing traffic to an instance that is currently available, not from having a single instance that just runs forever.