5 ms·

The original site made by lukegb inspired me because of the down-to-earth simplicity. Scaling vertically is often so much easier and better in so many dimension

The original site made by lukegb inspired me because of the down-to-earth simplicity. Scaling vertically is often so much easier and better in so many dimensions than creating a complex distributed computing setup. This is why I recreated the site when it went down quite a while ago. The recent article "Use One Big Server"[0] inspired me to (re)submit this website to HN because it addresses the same topic. I like this new article so much because in this day and age of the cloud, people tend to forget how insanely fast and powerful modern servers have become. And if you don't have budget for new equiment, the second-hand stuff from a few years back is stil beyond amazing and the prices are very reasonable compared to cloud cost. Sure, running bare metal co-located somewhere has it's own cost, but it's not that of a big deal and many issues can be dealt with using 'remote hands' services. To be fair, the article admits that in the end it's really about your organisation's specific circumstances and thus your requirements. Physical servers and/or vertical scaling may not (always) be the right answer. That said, do yourself a favour, and do take this option seriously and at least consider it. You can even do an experiment: buy some second-hand gear just to gain some experience with hardware if you don't have it already and do a trial in a co-location. Now that we are talking, yourdatafitsinram.net runs on a Raspberry Pi 4 which in turn is running on solar power.[1] (The blog and this site are both running on the same host) [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32319147 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32319147 [1]: https://louwrentius.com/this-blog-is-now-running-on-solar-power.html https://louwrentius.com/this-blog-is-now-running-on-solar-po...

karamanolev 4y ago
> many issues can be dealt with using 'remote hands' services. I have a few second-hand HP/Dell/Supermicro systems running colocated. I find that for all software issues, remote management / IPMI / KVM over IP is perfectly sufficient. Remote hands are needed only for actual hardware issues, most of which is "replace this component with an identical one". Usually HDD, if you're running those. Overall, I'm quite happy with the setup and it's very high on the value/$ spectrum.
- louwrentius 4y ago
  Yes, I bet a lot of people aren't even aware of IPMI/KVM over IP capabilities that servers have for decades, which makes hardware management (manual or automated!) much easier. Remote hands is for the inevitable hardware failure (Disk, PSU, Fan) or human error (you locked yourself out somehow remotely from IPMI). P.S. I have a HP Proliant DL380 G8 with 128 GB of memory and 20 physical cores as a lab system for playing with many virtual machines. I turn it on and off on demand using IPMI.
- toast0 4y ago
  IPMI is nice, although the older you go, the more particular it gets. I had professional experience with the SuperMicro Xeon e5-2600 series v1-4, and recently started renting a previous generation server[1] and it's worse than the ones I used before. It's still servicable though; but I'm not sure it it's using a dedicated LAN, because the kvm and the sol drop out when the OS starts or ends; it'll come back, but you miss early boot messages. It's definitely worth the effort to script starting the KVM, and maybe even the sol. If you've got a bunch of servers, you should script the power management as well, if nothing else, you want to rate limit power commands across your fleet to prevent accidental mass restarts. Intentional mass restarts can probably happen through the OS, so 1 power command per second across your fleet is probably fine. (You can always hack out the rate limit if you're really sure). [1] I don't need a whole server, but for $30/month when I wanted to leave my VPS behind for a few reasons anyway...

karamanolev 4y ago

> many issues can be dealt with using 'remote hands' services. I have a few second-hand HP/Dell/Supermicro systems running colocated. I find that for all software issues, remote management / IPMI / KVM over IP is perfectly sufficient. Remote hands are needed only for actual hardware issues, most of which is "replace this component with an identical one". Usually HDD, if you're running those. Overall, I'm quite happy with the setup and it's very high on the value/$ spectrum.

louwrentius 4y ago
Yes, I bet a lot of people aren't even aware of IPMI/KVM over IP capabilities that servers have for decades, which makes hardware management (manual or automated!) much easier. Remote hands is for the inevitable hardware failure (Disk, PSU, Fan) or human error (you locked yourself out somehow remotely from IPMI). P.S. I have a HP Proliant DL380 G8 with 128 GB of memory and 20 physical cores as a lab system for playing with many virtual machines. I turn it on and off on demand using IPMI.
toast0 4y ago
IPMI is nice, although the older you go, the more particular it gets. I had professional experience with the SuperMicro Xeon e5-2600 series v1-4, and recently started renting a previous generation server[1] and it's worse than the ones I used before. It's still servicable though; but I'm not sure it it's using a dedicated LAN, because the kvm and the sol drop out when the OS starts or ends; it'll come back, but you miss early boot messages. It's definitely worth the effort to script starting the KVM, and maybe even the sol. If you've got a bunch of servers, you should script the power management as well, if nothing else, you want to rate limit power commands across your fleet to prevent accidental mass restarts. Intentional mass restarts can probably happen through the OS, so 1 power command per second across your fleet is probably fine. (You can always hack out the rate limit if you're really sure). [1] I don't need a whole server, but for $30/month when I wanted to leave my VPS behind for a few reasons anyway...