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Our policy is outsource the IT to WebFaction. They RAID our data and back it up daily. Thanks WebFaction! If you are a start-up that doesn't have serious SysAd

Our policy is outsource the IT to WebFaction. They RAID our data and back it up daily. Thanks WebFaction! If you are a start-up that doesn't have serious SysAdmin talent on-board, the only logical call is to outsource every machine possible. Even if you are ludicrously good hackers, you need to have a true Linux money, who isn't needed elsewhere coding, to consider not outsourcing web and email hosting. And you should back-up anything important on your personal computers to a managed box. I really can't say how deeply I believe this. I've worked with multiple start-ups, and the minute you start trying to host your own website, do your own backups, serve your own emails - you're asking for trouble. Even if you set up everything right, just the time dealing with the computers could be better spent changing the world Whatever you do, don't host actual email boxes in house. A telephone pole will get hit by a truck, and you will lose email for two days, and no amount of tech smarts will get you out of that. Trust me, it happens. You can get a slice of a computer for $10 bucks a month these days from Webfaction - which comes with tech support that extends from installing PostGIS, to an optimized PostGres install, an optimized Apache static content server, and answers to tech support within the hour, even on the weekends. As soon as a machine you manage costs you an hour, you're financial decision has become a poor one. Also, they have better security than you.

jd 18y ago
I've seen how seriously some providers/hosting companies treat backups. Let's just say that deleting backups to free up space for new accounts was considered perfectly OK. I completely agree it is something you -want- to outsource, because, exactly as you say, it's not something you want to spend time on. But you depend on your servers so completely that you become completely dependent on your provider. What if your provider goes bankrupt? You'll have to move your server / move the data and nobody knows how it used to work. At that point you have very few options left. What if a tech decides to upgrade the kernel and the server doesn't boot anymore? Oops. In general, the linux techs aren't paid very well, are often overworked, are expected to fix problems at any point in the night and they don't particularly care about your server (no more than they care about the 100 servers next to it). Now add root access to the mix and watch what happens. If nobody in your startup team knows how to administer a server then you're taking a risk. A big and unnecessary one. ps: saying something like "an optimized Postgres install" makes no sense. Optimization is for specific tasks. So unless the techs know exactly what kind of queries you run they can't do much optimization. They can however, easily cripple sql performance.

jd 18y ago

I've seen how seriously some providers/hosting companies treat backups. Let's just say that deleting backups to free up space for new accounts was considered perfectly OK. I completely agree it is something you -want- to outsource, because, exactly as you say, it's not something you want to spend time on. But you depend on your servers so completely that you become completely dependent on your provider. What if your provider goes bankrupt? You'll have to move your server / move the data and nobody knows how it used to work. At that point you have very few options left. What if a tech decides to upgrade the kernel and the server doesn't boot anymore? Oops. In general, the linux techs aren't paid very well, are often overworked, are expected to fix problems at any point in the night and they don't particularly care about your server (no more than they care about the 100 servers next to it). Now add root access to the mix and watch what happens. If nobody in your startup team knows how to administer a server then you're taking a risk. A big and unnecessary one. ps: saying something like "an optimized Postgres install" makes no sense. Optimization is for specific tasks. So unless the techs know exactly what kind of queries you run they can't do much optimization. They can however, easily cripple sql performance.