6 ms·

Honestly my server at home has more uptime than US-East-1

BossingAround 5y ago
Does your server at home handle similar traffic to that of US-East-1 since you're comparing uptime? Simiarly, my laptop, if I keep it plugged in the wall, and enable httpd on localhost, will surely have better uptime than any of the top clouds. I'd bet that it'd have 100% uptime if I plugged in a UPS and cared for traffic on my local network only.
- IceWreck 5y ago
  No but I access my home-server remotely from my university all the time and it hasn't gone down once. Better uptime than paying for EC2 on AWS US-East-1. Obviously this approach isn't scalable but it serves me well.
  - amelius 5y ago
    > Obviously this approach isn't scalable but it serves me well. It's perfectly scalable. Just give everybody their own home server.
- Sammi 5y ago
  > Does your server at home handle similar traffic to that of US-East-1 since you're comparing uptime? Of course it doesn't. Why are you asking antagonistic questions?
  - grumple 5y ago
    He asked it to demonstrate the point that uptime is trivial for one server with no traffic, and much harder at scale with auto scaling.
    - dijit 5y ago
      Then don't host with so many people? I don't think people care that AWS has other customers, they want their workload to work, if it doesn't: then that's a today issue.
      - grumple 5y ago
        I'm not sure your reply makes sense, seems like a non-sequiter. Individual companies might require thousands of servers and not want then running all the time. This means they either maintain thousands of servers on premises, or they use aws and auto scale. This has nothing to do with aws having other customers, and everything to do with only wanting to pay for and maintain as little as possible while being able to serve your applications.
  - akyoan 5y ago
    > Honestly my server at home has more uptime than US-East-1 Is this not antagonistic? It's pointless to make these statements, so your parent comment pointed it out. Go downvote the first one instead.
- loopdoend 5y ago
  Your home ISP has 100% uptime? That's incredible.
  - adamm255 5y ago
    Mines had 100% uptime for the past 2 months. I’ve had great value for money using a NUC for personal projects than public cloud subscriptions over the past few years.
  - BossingAround 5y ago
    I mentioned local network, didn't I...
  - omh2 5y ago
    Lets be real here, we don't need anywhere near 100% ISP uptime to beat AWS over the last couple months...
    - acdha 5y ago
      That depends on what you mean by AWS. I had production workloads in us-east-1 which haven’t been affected by any of these, and others which had only modest degradation. We had control plane issues but the running services were fine. Put another way: even if your home ISP has had 100% uptime, are you comfortable saying that was true for all of their customers?
- christophilus 5y ago
  Most people don't need to handle the traffic of US-East-1. They just need a single, simple, mostly reliable server. But they're often told, "Don't do that. It's too hard, and irresponsible, and what if you get a spike in traffic, and what if you need to add 5 new servers, and security is really hard." In reality, most people don't need to scale. An occasional spike in traffic is a nuisance, but not the end of the world, and security is not terribly hard, if you keep your servers patched (which is trivial to automate). I really don't understand why there's so much FUD around running your own stuff.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - ryanbrunner 5y ago
    I think most people on here are coming from the perspective of startups, which scale out of a single server setup pretty quickly. At a bare minimum, most will have dedicated purpose-built servers like Redis or a DB, and often there's separate background workers, or a load balancer with a couple of web servers. When your server requirements get into needing 5-6 servers (not at all atypical for a startup in their first year of being launched), running your own stuff becomes more of a challenge pretty quickly. Factor in 2-3x growth a year, and the challenges just mount.
    - doublerabbit 5y ago
      > running your own stuff becomes more of a challenge pretty quickly. Factor in 2-3x growth a year, and the challenges just mount. What challenges are you thinking of? You buy a full-rack in colocation and then just buy servers/hardware when required. If a company has the budget for AWS or some other cloud provider then they would have a budget for colocation; which in long term is cheaper. I see no additional challenge other than maintaining X amount of hardware than just one.
      - manquer 5y ago
        Long term is unknown to the startup , they may fail or pivot . Buying upfront hardware is not feasible even if I had the cash(which most don't), I don't know if the company would last that long or would be doing things that require x servers . What you are saying is similar to saying may be it is cheaper to buy the building /floor instead of renting space for office. - most small biz cannot afford do that, or expect their business to change (fail/take off) in the time frame ROI would come to take that commitment. This is all assuming that a the startup has skill in setting up and managing physical servers and there is no opportunity costs( delayed features) on doing so, both are not a given. small companies ( and poor people) typically don't buy low quality stuff or buy into rent seeking business models because they are dumb it is usually because they cannot afford to do long term thinking.
TacticalCoder 5y ago
I should blog about this one day but... I have a server at OVH (not affiliated to them) which, at this point, I keep only for fun. It has 3162 days of uptime as I type this. 3 162 days. That's 8 years+ of uptime. Does it have the traffic of Amazon? No. Is it secure? Very likely not: it's running an old Debian version (Debian 7, which came out in, well, 2013). It only has one port opened though, SSH. And with quite a hardened SSH setup at that. I installed all the security patches I could install without rebooting it (so, yes, I know, this means I didn't install all the security patches for some required rebooting). This server is, by now, a statement. It's about how stable Linux can be. It's about how amazingly stable Debian is. It's also about OVH: at times they had part of their datacenter burn (yup), at times they had full racks that had to be moved/disconnected. But somehow my server never got affected. It may have happened that at one point OVH had connectivity issues but my server went down. I "gave back" many of my servers I didn't need anymore. But this one I keep just because... I still use it, but only as an additional online/off-site backup where I send encrypted backups. It's not as if it gets zero use: I typically push backups to it daily. They're only backups, they're encrypted. Even if my server is "owned" by some bad guys, the damage he could do is limited. Never seen anything suspicious on it though. I like to do "silly" stuff like that. Like that one time I solve LCS35 by computing for about four years on commodity hardware at home. I think it's about time I start to do some archeology on that server, to see what I can find. Apparently I installed Debian 7 on it in mid-october 2013. I've created a temporary user account on it, which at times I've handle the password (before resetting it) to people just so they could SSH in and type: "uptime". It is a thing of beauty. Eight. Years. Of. Uptime.
- nextaccountic 5y ago
  > Like that one time I solve LCS35 by computing for about four years on commodity hardware at home. Awesome! Are you Bernard Fabrot [0]? [0] https://www.csail.mit.edu/news/programmers-solve-mits-20-year-old-cryptographic-puzzle https://www.csail.mit.edu/news/programmers-solve-mits-20-yea...
  - TacticalCoder 5y ago
    Yup that's me... I fear this (old by now) story blew my "tacticalcoder" cover.

Does your server at home handle similar traffic to that of US-East-1 since you're comparing uptime? Simiarly, my laptop, if I keep it plugged in the wall, and enable httpd on localhost, will surely have better uptime than any of the top clouds. I'd bet that it'd have 100% uptime if I plugged in a UPS and cared for traffic on my local network only.

IceWreck 5y ago
No but I access my home-server remotely from my university all the time and it hasn't gone down once. Better uptime than paying for EC2 on AWS US-East-1. Obviously this approach isn't scalable but it serves me well.
- amelius 5y ago
  > Obviously this approach isn't scalable but it serves me well. It's perfectly scalable. Just give everybody their own home server.
Sammi 5y ago
> Does your server at home handle similar traffic to that of US-East-1 since you're comparing uptime? Of course it doesn't. Why are you asking antagonistic questions?
- grumple 5y ago
  He asked it to demonstrate the point that uptime is trivial for one server with no traffic, and much harder at scale with auto scaling.
  - dijit 5y ago
    Then don't host with so many people? I don't think people care that AWS has other customers, they want their workload to work, if it doesn't: then that's a today issue.
    - grumple 5y ago
      I'm not sure your reply makes sense, seems like a non-sequiter. Individual companies might require thousands of servers and not want then running all the time. This means they either maintain thousands of servers on premises, or they use aws and auto scale. This has nothing to do with aws having other customers, and everything to do with only wanting to pay for and maintain as little as possible while being able to serve your applications.
- akyoan 5y ago
  > Honestly my server at home has more uptime than US-East-1 Is this not antagonistic? It's pointless to make these statements, so your parent comment pointed it out. Go downvote the first one instead.
loopdoend 5y ago
Your home ISP has 100% uptime? That's incredible.
- adamm255 5y ago
  Mines had 100% uptime for the past 2 months. I’ve had great value for money using a NUC for personal projects than public cloud subscriptions over the past few years.
- BossingAround 5y ago
  I mentioned local network, didn't I...
- omh2 5y ago
  Lets be real here, we don't need anywhere near 100% ISP uptime to beat AWS over the last couple months...
  - acdha 5y ago
    That depends on what you mean by AWS. I had production workloads in us-east-1 which haven’t been affected by any of these, and others which had only modest degradation. We had control plane issues but the running services were fine. Put another way: even if your home ISP has had 100% uptime, are you comfortable saying that was true for all of their customers?
christophilus 5y ago
Most people don't need to handle the traffic of US-East-1. They just need a single, simple, mostly reliable server. But they're often told, "Don't do that. It's too hard, and irresponsible, and what if you get a spike in traffic, and what if you need to add 5 new servers, and security is really hard." In reality, most people don't need to scale. An occasional spike in traffic is a nuisance, but not the end of the world, and security is not terribly hard, if you keep your servers patched (which is trivial to automate). I really don't understand why there's so much FUD around running your own stuff.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ryanbrunner 5y ago
  I think most people on here are coming from the perspective of startups, which scale out of a single server setup pretty quickly. At a bare minimum, most will have dedicated purpose-built servers like Redis or a DB, and often there's separate background workers, or a load balancer with a couple of web servers. When your server requirements get into needing 5-6 servers (not at all atypical for a startup in their first year of being launched), running your own stuff becomes more of a challenge pretty quickly. Factor in 2-3x growth a year, and the challenges just mount.
  - doublerabbit 5y ago
    > running your own stuff becomes more of a challenge pretty quickly. Factor in 2-3x growth a year, and the challenges just mount. What challenges are you thinking of? You buy a full-rack in colocation and then just buy servers/hardware when required. If a company has the budget for AWS or some other cloud provider then they would have a budget for colocation; which in long term is cheaper. I see no additional challenge other than maintaining X amount of hardware than just one.
    - manquer 5y ago
      Long term is unknown to the startup , they may fail or pivot . Buying upfront hardware is not feasible even if I had the cash(which most don't), I don't know if the company would last that long or would be doing things that require x servers . What you are saying is similar to saying may be it is cheaper to buy the building /floor instead of renting space for office. - most small biz cannot afford do that, or expect their business to change (fail/take off) in the time frame ROI would come to take that commitment. This is all assuming that a the startup has skill in setting up and managing physical servers and there is no opportunity costs( delayed features) on doing so, both are not a given. small companies ( and poor people) typically don't buy low quality stuff or buy into rent seeking business models because they are dumb it is usually because they cannot afford to do long term thinking.

TacticalCoder 5y ago

I should blog about this one day but... I have a server at OVH (not affiliated to them) which, at this point, I keep only for fun. It has 3162 days of uptime as I type this. 3 162 days. That's 8 years+ of uptime. Does it have the traffic of Amazon? No. Is it secure? Very likely not: it's running an old Debian version (Debian 7, which came out in, well, 2013). It only has one port opened though, SSH. And with quite a hardened SSH setup at that. I installed all the security patches I could install without rebooting it (so, yes, I know, this means I didn't install all the security patches for some required rebooting). This server is, by now, a statement. It's about how stable Linux can be. It's about how amazingly stable Debian is. It's also about OVH: at times they had part of their datacenter burn (yup), at times they had full racks that had to be moved/disconnected. But somehow my server never got affected. It may have happened that at one point OVH had connectivity issues but my server went down. I "gave back" many of my servers I didn't need anymore. But this one I keep just because... I still use it, but only as an additional online/off-site backup where I send encrypted backups. It's not as if it gets zero use: I typically push backups to it daily. They're only backups, they're encrypted. Even if my server is "owned" by some bad guys, the damage he could do is limited. Never seen anything suspicious on it though. I like to do "silly" stuff like that. Like that one time I solve LCS35 by computing for about four years on commodity hardware at home. I think it's about time I start to do some archeology on that server, to see what I can find. Apparently I installed Debian 7 on it in mid-october 2013. I've created a temporary user account on it, which at times I've handle the password (before resetting it) to people just so they could SSH in and type: "uptime". It is a thing of beauty. Eight. Years. Of. Uptime.

nextaccountic 5y ago
> Like that one time I solve LCS35 by computing for about four years on commodity hardware at home. Awesome! Are you Bernard Fabrot [0]? [0] https://www.csail.mit.edu/news/programmers-solve-mits-20-year-old-cryptographic-puzzle https://www.csail.mit.edu/news/programmers-solve-mits-20-yea...
- TacticalCoder 5y ago
  Yup that's me... I fear this (old by now) story blew my "tacticalcoder" cover.