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There are many approaches which don't depend on AWS, and not all of them mean hosting your own physical servers, and they certainly don't mean you don't have an

There are many approaches which don't depend on AWS, and not all of them mean hosting your own physical servers, and they certainly don't mean you don't have an off-site backup policy. There are well-understood answers to all your questions, they are not too difficult, they just cost money - some businesses choose not to spend that money, some weigh cost-benefit and go for AWS, some decide to go for in-house servers, some go for hosted Virtual Servers, some go for serverless. Why does everything have to be built one way?

gregmac 5y ago
> they just cost money - some businesses choose not to spend that money, some weight cost-benefit and go for AWS, some weigh cost benefit and decide to go for in house, some go for hosted Virtual Servers, some go for Serverless. I'd also say some choose not to spend the money, but fail to consider the cost of that choice. For example: Doing old-school manual deployments that require herculean efforts to update at off-hours on the weekends burns people out, and makes it hard to attract new talent. In other words, you've made the decision to spend more money on finding and retaining people. But it's definitely way cheaper to pay for colocating a single Dell server you bought 3 years ago than what you'd spend in the same time on AWS. And if your hardware never dies, paying for the redundancy might seem silly. A lot like paying for fire insurance despite the fact your house has never even burned down.
- grey-area 5y ago
  Your choice of straw man here is interesting. Of the options I mentioned, you seem to have picked only self-purchased hardware with no redundancy and no backups (your addition) to compare with, and also throw in manual deployment (why?). Most businesses are somewhere between a forgotten old dell server in the closet and fully hosted multi-region auto-scaling fully bought in to AWS, and that's OK!
oxfordmale 5y ago
i am not saying everyone needs to go for AWS and there are many good reasons for self hosting However, if the only reason for self hosting is a higher uptime than AWS or GCP, it is general false economy, and you are likely taking short cuts that you are not aware of.
- grey-area 5y ago
  This is a false dichotomy (I listed many options, not just self hosting, not many businesses fully self-host these days), and uptime is provably significantly better away from the big hosted services which are constantly churning features, config and hardware resulting in outages for everyone hosted on them.

gregmac 5y ago

> they just cost money - some businesses choose not to spend that money, some weight cost-benefit and go for AWS, some weigh cost benefit and decide to go for in house, some go for hosted Virtual Servers, some go for Serverless. I'd also say some choose not to spend the money, but fail to consider the cost of that choice. For example: Doing old-school manual deployments that require herculean efforts to update at off-hours on the weekends burns people out, and makes it hard to attract new talent. In other words, you've made the decision to spend more money on finding and retaining people. But it's definitely way cheaper to pay for colocating a single Dell server you bought 3 years ago than what you'd spend in the same time on AWS. And if your hardware never dies, paying for the redundancy might seem silly. A lot like paying for fire insurance despite the fact your house has never even burned down.

grey-area 5y ago
Your choice of straw man here is interesting. Of the options I mentioned, you seem to have picked only self-purchased hardware with no redundancy and no backups (your addition) to compare with, and also throw in manual deployment (why?). Most businesses are somewhere between a forgotten old dell server in the closet and fully hosted multi-region auto-scaling fully bought in to AWS, and that's OK!

oxfordmale 5y ago

i am not saying everyone needs to go for AWS and there are many good reasons for self hosting However, if the only reason for self hosting is a higher uptime than AWS or GCP, it is general false economy, and you are likely taking short cuts that you are not aware of.

grey-area 5y ago
This is a false dichotomy (I listed many options, not just self hosting, not many businesses fully self-host these days), and uptime is provably significantly better away from the big hosted services which are constantly churning features, config and hardware resulting in outages for everyone hosted on them.