4 ms·

Most web projects can tolerate an hour of scheduled downtime a week and the occasional (< 1/year) unscheduled hour of downtime to replace broken hardware. Runni

Most web projects can tolerate an hour of scheduled downtime a week and the occasional (< 1/year) unscheduled hour of downtime to replace broken hardware. Running on a single machine with 2 disks in RAID1 right up until the point where the ~50 hours of downtime a year equal one engineer's salary in lost revenue makes sense if you pick a DC that will sell/rent you replacement hardware and do replacements for you. Just make sure you have offsite backups in case the DC burns down. If your office/home is near a well stocked computer store, most web projects can skip the DC altogether and just put the server in the closet under the stairs or whatever. The company will likely die before the server does anyways.

valenterry 2y ago
> Most web projects can tolerate an hour of scheduled downtime a week and the occasional (< 1/year) unscheduled hour of downtime to replace broken hardware. An hour? What happens if it breaks while I'm on vacation and no one is there to take care? Nah, that argument might work sometimes but not in general.
- snackbroken 2y ago
  Yes, an hour. In practice, most scheduled maintenance will take closer to a minute than the full scheduled hour. If it's good enough for the government and the bank, it's probably good enough for you. What happens if you're on vacation and something breaks is that you call/email the DC and ask them to replace what's broken, same as if you were not on vacation. In my experience most DCs will have the replacement done in less than 30 min from receiving the ticket, good ones will do it in under 15. If the project is ran by more than one person, simply don't all take a vacation at the same time. Worst case scenario you point DNS to a free static page host that reads "Server broke. Working on a fix, check back tomorrow." (or the appropriate corporate-PR phrasing of the same if applicable) while you wait for the computer store to open so you can buy a new one. Even if you are once-in-a-lifetime unlucky and the damn thing breaks while you're on vacation and for some reason your monitoring fails to notify you, big whoop. You can probably get away with just apologizing for the inconvenience and moving on. If a week long outage is enough to make or break your business, your business isn't gonna work out anyway. This applies to practically all web projects from the home page of the pizza place on the corner of your street to 100-employee e-commerce sites. If a single machine can run it, it can probably run on a single machine. Use the dumbest tool that will get the job done, switch to a smarter tool when it won't.
  - valenterry 2y ago
    Even just setting up and documenting all the things you mentioned is already taking so much time and effort, that I'd rather pay a few more bucks for a HA system...
  - Orygin 2y ago
    > If a week long outage is enough to make or break your business, your business isn't gonna work out anyway. If your business has an SLA with its customers, having a week long outage is going to break your business. Some contracts I saw had a 15 minute reaction time where you had to acknowledge the issue, and after 1 hour of downtime there are penalties. The same contract also required redundancy (of hardware, internet lines as well as location for the DCs). We could not have hosted that on a Raspi, or a single machine. I don't think reducing the scale issue to "you ain't gonna need it" is right. Obviously to most projects it's not gonna be needed. But when it does and you need to grow, you'll be happy you have a redundant infrastructure that you can spin up/down easily instead of having to call your DC to ask for more hardware to be installed.
    - valenterry 2y ago
      To be fair, that is probably out of scope for what OP meant.
      - Orygin 2y ago
        Maybe for the author of the blog post, about his personal projects. But the user I replied to seemed to indicate even "100-employee e-commerce sites" don't need any redundancy for their website, which I disagree with.
    - fxtentacle 2y ago
      "If your business has an SLA with its customers" then you also need a paid SLA with Amazon and now we're talking about the 100k annually cost range where you can also afford to hire freelancers to babysit your sever while you're gone.
- fxtentacle 2y ago
  What happens if AWS has a hiccup that restarts your VM? The answer might be to buy management services. Or an SLA for AWS.
theshrike79 2y ago
Most but not all. If you're running an online shop/reservation system, a hour of downtime can be tens of thousands of lost revenue.
- fxtentacle 2y ago
  Revenue, not profit. Many small shops voluntarily turn off their website for some weeks so that the employees can take a Christmas break. So it seems like the business can handle a week offline.

valenterry 2y ago

> Most web projects can tolerate an hour of scheduled downtime a week and the occasional (< 1/year) unscheduled hour of downtime to replace broken hardware. An hour? What happens if it breaks while I'm on vacation and no one is there to take care? Nah, that argument might work sometimes but not in general.

snackbroken 2y ago
Yes, an hour. In practice, most scheduled maintenance will take closer to a minute than the full scheduled hour. If it's good enough for the government and the bank, it's probably good enough for you. What happens if you're on vacation and something breaks is that you call/email the DC and ask them to replace what's broken, same as if you were not on vacation. In my experience most DCs will have the replacement done in less than 30 min from receiving the ticket, good ones will do it in under 15. If the project is ran by more than one person, simply don't all take a vacation at the same time. Worst case scenario you point DNS to a free static page host that reads "Server broke. Working on a fix, check back tomorrow." (or the appropriate corporate-PR phrasing of the same if applicable) while you wait for the computer store to open so you can buy a new one. Even if you are once-in-a-lifetime unlucky and the damn thing breaks while you're on vacation and for some reason your monitoring fails to notify you, big whoop. You can probably get away with just apologizing for the inconvenience and moving on. If a week long outage is enough to make or break your business, your business isn't gonna work out anyway. This applies to practically all web projects from the home page of the pizza place on the corner of your street to 100-employee e-commerce sites. If a single machine can run it, it can probably run on a single machine. Use the dumbest tool that will get the job done, switch to a smarter tool when it won't.
- valenterry 2y ago
  Even just setting up and documenting all the things you mentioned is already taking so much time and effort, that I'd rather pay a few more bucks for a HA system...
- Orygin 2y ago
  > If a week long outage is enough to make or break your business, your business isn't gonna work out anyway. If your business has an SLA with its customers, having a week long outage is going to break your business. Some contracts I saw had a 15 minute reaction time where you had to acknowledge the issue, and after 1 hour of downtime there are penalties. The same contract also required redundancy (of hardware, internet lines as well as location for the DCs). We could not have hosted that on a Raspi, or a single machine. I don't think reducing the scale issue to "you ain't gonna need it" is right. Obviously to most projects it's not gonna be needed. But when it does and you need to grow, you'll be happy you have a redundant infrastructure that you can spin up/down easily instead of having to call your DC to ask for more hardware to be installed.
  - valenterry 2y ago
    To be fair, that is probably out of scope for what OP meant.
    - Orygin 2y ago
      Maybe for the author of the blog post, about his personal projects. But the user I replied to seemed to indicate even "100-employee e-commerce sites" don't need any redundancy for their website, which I disagree with.
  - fxtentacle 2y ago
    "If your business has an SLA with its customers" then you also need a paid SLA with Amazon and now we're talking about the 100k annually cost range where you can also afford to hire freelancers to babysit your sever while you're gone.
fxtentacle 2y ago
What happens if AWS has a hiccup that restarts your VM? The answer might be to buy management services. Or an SLA for AWS.

theshrike79 2y ago

Most but not all. If you're running an online shop/reservation system, a hour of downtime can be tens of thousands of lost revenue.

fxtentacle 2y ago
Revenue, not profit. Many small shops voluntarily turn off their website for some weeks so that the employees can take a Christmas break. So it seems like the business can handle a week offline.