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Yes, albeit it was a bit more expensive. I was running multiple sites by myself. There was less encapsulation (unless you were working with someone on bsd), fo

Yes, albeit it was a bit more expensive. I was running multiple sites by myself. There was less encapsulation (unless you were working with someone on bsd), for sure, but I'd say the advantages are more visible in terms of security (hacking was much easier back then) than ease to deploy. Doing your own ops has never been that hard (YMMV) and I don't think it improved much nowadays. Scaling to n machines didn't change as well. Deploy n instances, load balancers, scaling vertically then horizontally, db sharding. You still have the same fundamentals. One pro of today is having a single artifact to deploy (tons of cowboys deployments and FTP uploads in the past). One big cons you have nowadays is learning all the latest crap $currentCompany is using and having to peel the layers of abstractions to see why things work so badly.

skohan 6y ago
> Doing your own ops has never been that hard I kind of disagree. It's doable, but still requires maintenance. For instance, even running a simple blog off of a VPS requires you to worry about setting up an SSL certificate and keeping it renewed, staying on top of security updates, and putting together some kind of scaling solution assuming you ever want to write a post which gets to the front page of hacker news. I think there's definitely an argument at a certain scale to just outsourcing that complexity so you can actually work on what contributes to your unique value proposition.
- 10000truths 6y ago
  Your examples are poor. LetsEncrypt and certbot automated cert renewals a long time ago. If you’re still having to manually renew your SSL certs, you’ve picked a crappy vendor. Security updates are also as simple as a cron job that runs your favorite package manager update command. You want to run those commands on multiple machines? Use the several different FOSS orchestration platforms that make it easy for you to deploy and configure your distributed services. Sure, these things take some initial set up, but it’s nothing that can’t be accomplished in a few business days for a start-up.

skohan 6y ago

> Doing your own ops has never been that hard I kind of disagree. It's doable, but still requires maintenance. For instance, even running a simple blog off of a VPS requires you to worry about setting up an SSL certificate and keeping it renewed, staying on top of security updates, and putting together some kind of scaling solution assuming you ever want to write a post which gets to the front page of hacker news. I think there's definitely an argument at a certain scale to just outsourcing that complexity so you can actually work on what contributes to your unique value proposition.

10000truths 6y ago
Your examples are poor. LetsEncrypt and certbot automated cert renewals a long time ago. If you’re still having to manually renew your SSL certs, you’ve picked a crappy vendor. Security updates are also as simple as a cron job that runs your favorite package manager update command. You want to run those commands on multiple machines? Use the several different FOSS orchestration platforms that make it easy for you to deploy and configure your distributed services. Sure, these things take some initial set up, but it’s nothing that can’t be accomplished in a few business days for a start-up.