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OpenRent[1] founder here. I was the only technical person at our company until we hit 1m users (certainly only person who could restart/switch servers). I gues

OpenRent[1] founder here. I was the only technical person at our company until we hit 1m users (certainly only person who could restart/switch servers). I guess the question is, what happens if the server goes down whilst you're at work? The answer is that if you're constantly fighting fires 9-6, your software is probably severely broken. I'd suggest this is pretty unusual, or at least, I've never heard of software being held together like that at a company that still exists. You wouldn't want the servers to go down whilst you're at work, in a meeting, or out to dinner with friends. So you design things to be as redundant as reasonably possible. Then when you make a mistake, you fix it so it never happens again. Server fear should be the least of your worries. As a founder, lots of things can go wrong that will interrupt a holiday or downtime. In my experience, it's rarely, if ever, software or hardware issues. [1] - https://www.openrent.co.uk https://www.openrent.co.uk

tmitchel2 6y ago
So you are saying that if you are a solo founder and you have designed in redundancy then it's all good to take a holiday and not monitor anything?
- wongarsu 6y ago
  No, you design a system that doesn't go down while you are on holiday, but with monitoring for the unlikely case that it does
- ozim 6y ago
  I see you got some down votes but I see your question more as a helpful inquiry. Idea is that you don't have to monitor anything actively. You still have your phone and email in case something goes wrong. But you are not franticly checking dashboards if response time is slower for 0.05 second in actual moment. What parent is saying if you have normal operations most of the time everything will be OK. Despite all of the "spooky stories" software and servers are mostly reliable and you probably don't need that much redundancy that people who sell magic solutions would like you to believe. If you look at statistics even for google, most of the downtime is when someone is changing something on the servers. When you are a single founder and you are having a diner and not changing config of your servers or deploying new software 95% of reasons for server going down are off the table.
vptr 6y ago
> Server fear should be the least of your worries. As a founder, lots of things can go wrong that will interrupt a holiday or downtime. In my experience, it's rarely, if ever, software or hardware issues. I agree. My own product did not go down pretty much at all in 3 years. But I've seen problems all over the place while working FT at a tech companoes. Usually, these were created by devs during software releases that would take systems down or corrupt data. So, don't release silly things before you go on a vacation.

tmitchel2 6y ago

So you are saying that if you are a solo founder and you have designed in redundancy then it's all good to take a holiday and not monitor anything?

wongarsu 6y ago
No, you design a system that doesn't go down while you are on holiday, but with monitoring for the unlikely case that it does
ozim 6y ago
I see you got some down votes but I see your question more as a helpful inquiry. Idea is that you don't have to monitor anything actively. You still have your phone and email in case something goes wrong. But you are not franticly checking dashboards if response time is slower for 0.05 second in actual moment. What parent is saying if you have normal operations most of the time everything will be OK. Despite all of the "spooky stories" software and servers are mostly reliable and you probably don't need that much redundancy that people who sell magic solutions would like you to believe. If you look at statistics even for google, most of the downtime is when someone is changing something on the servers. When you are a single founder and you are having a diner and not changing config of your servers or deploying new software 95% of reasons for server going down are off the table.

vptr 6y ago

> Server fear should be the least of your worries. As a founder, lots of things can go wrong that will interrupt a holiday or downtime. In my experience, it's rarely, if ever, software or hardware issues. I agree. My own product did not go down pretty much at all in 3 years. But I've seen problems all over the place while working FT at a tech companoes. Usually, these were created by devs during software releases that would take systems down or corrupt data. So, don't release silly things before you go on a vacation.