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I think that's great for hosting your own stuff. Just personally not something I'd want to do once I really need high availability (power outages/network outage

I think that's great for hosting your own stuff. Just personally not something I'd want to do once I really need high availability (power outages/network outages). But I suspect it might actually be a great way for compute bound startups to start for cheap.

Syonyk 3y ago
So... Why do you need such high availability that a rare power outage, network outage, or equipment failure is such a big deal? I ask having spent a lot of my college years (and some beyond) trying to run "enterprise grade uptime on a college student budget" - with the appropriate frustration. I've come around to a more casual, "As long as I can reasonably get it back up in a day or two, meh..." way of thinking about various services. It's important to figure out what you need and what you want - a few friends and I once had a stack of rather compute-heavy boxes in a rack, and we ran most of them without a UPS. The provided UPS wasn't enough amps for what we were running, so we just backed up the core stuff and left the crunchers subject to outages. Stuff could restart easily enough without a big deal. It was annoying, but not a big deal. I'd argue that most startups don't need a multi-region, globally backed up infrastructure. And that they'd be a lot better off with less, cashflow-wise. But I guess that's not "Built to scale to 10B users" that VC fund expect to see these days, so... jump through the hoops provided?
- theLiminator 3y ago
  Customer trust is one of the most important assets, it's hard to earn, and once lost it's incredibly hard to get back. Hosting your own infra makes that risk much higher. Especially if you're providing a critical path service. I'm not saying that you need some overkill multi-region globally backed up setup, it definitely varies and depends on the nature of your business. If what you're doing works great for you, keep doing it!

Syonyk 3y ago

So... Why do you need such high availability that a rare power outage, network outage, or equipment failure is such a big deal? I ask having spent a lot of my college years (and some beyond) trying to run "enterprise grade uptime on a college student budget" - with the appropriate frustration. I've come around to a more casual, "As long as I can reasonably get it back up in a day or two, meh..." way of thinking about various services. It's important to figure out what you need and what you want - a few friends and I once had a stack of rather compute-heavy boxes in a rack, and we ran most of them without a UPS. The provided UPS wasn't enough amps for what we were running, so we just backed up the core stuff and left the crunchers subject to outages. Stuff could restart easily enough without a big deal. It was annoying, but not a big deal. I'd argue that most startups don't need a multi-region, globally backed up infrastructure. And that they'd be a lot better off with less, cashflow-wise. But I guess that's not "Built to scale to 10B users" that VC fund expect to see these days, so... jump through the hoops provided?

theLiminator 3y ago
Customer trust is one of the most important assets, it's hard to earn, and once lost it's incredibly hard to get back. Hosting your own infra makes that risk much higher. Especially if you're providing a critical path service. I'm not saying that you need some overkill multi-region globally backed up setup, it definitely varies and depends on the nature of your business. If what you're doing works great for you, keep doing it!