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No, building data centers is not your core business, but your core business relies on them so intimately that it makes sense (at least to some people) to have a

by brk 16y ago

No, building data centers is not your core business, but your core business relies on them so intimately that it makes sense (at least to some people) to have a little more direct control of your datacenter resources. Or, the have a warm-standby of some sort. The best analogy I can make is it's like a telemarketing company. Their core business is not building/owning/maintaining PBXs, it's calling you and trying to sell you crap at diner time. However, because they cannot deliver their core product reliably without a PBX, they tend to own/maintain their phone switches. They don't order 300 simple phone lines from the local telco, they order a couple of trunks, and manage phones and call routing to fulfill their core business needs. It's not a perfect analogy, I know, there are cost factors unaddressed, but it's the best I can come up with right now. I'm personally a fan of cloud services for elasticity, and early stage launching. I'm not a big fan for day to day operation of a site. The model I haven't seen worked up yet, it what does this REALLY cost a site like reedit or 4sq in relation to owning/controlling more of their own infrastructure? It's quite possible the best overall business decision is to take the risk and deal with the unpredictable inevitable outages and just hope they don't last too long.

Duff 16y ago
At the end of the day, you need to make money. The question becomes: can you afford to be in the datacenter business? Executing well in operating a facility with significant scale means that you need to have folks working for you who have a clue about operating a datacenter. That's not cheap. IMO, the real question is whether or not you should be running your core business on a genericized "public cloud" like Amazon or if you should be using a traditional server hosting outfit, a managed service provider like Verizon/AT&T or a colo. There's a value calculation that you have to compute to figure out what's right for you. I worked for a company that ran call centers and had a significant commerce site (whose growth exploded beyond expectations) back in the early 2000's. Our offices were a converted school and the datacenter was a classroom with a roof A/C unit. We knew it sucked and suffered through downtime and failures, but the company wasn't big enough to do things the "right" way. So we had to do things the "wrong" way, because the alternative was to go out of business. If that were today, we would almost certainly have had 80% of our systems at Amazon/Rackspace facilities.

by brk 16y ago

Duff 16y ago

At the end of the day, you need to make money. The question becomes: can you afford to be in the datacenter business? Executing well in operating a facility with significant scale means that you need to have folks working for you who have a clue about operating a datacenter. That's not cheap. IMO, the real question is whether or not you should be running your core business on a genericized "public cloud" like Amazon or if you should be using a traditional server hosting outfit, a managed service provider like Verizon/AT&T or a colo. There's a value calculation that you have to compute to figure out what's right for you. I worked for a company that ran call centers and had a significant commerce site (whose growth exploded beyond expectations) back in the early 2000's. Our offices were a converted school and the datacenter was a classroom with a roof A/C unit. We knew it sucked and suffered through downtime and failures, but the company wasn't big enough to do things the "right" way. So we had to do things the "wrong" way, because the alternative was to go out of business. If that were today, we would almost certainly have had 80% of our systems at Amazon/Rackspace facilities.