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We depend on FogBugz (hosted) to answer our support E-mails. If the downtime is on the order of several hours, I'm fine with it, these things happen. But if (as

by jwr 14y ago

We depend on FogBugz (hosted) to answer our support E-mails. If the downtime is on the order of several hours, I'm fine with it, these things happen. But if (as it looks like) it is on the order of days, I'll be looking for another solution. When you offer hosted services (not cheap, mind you), you take on responsibilities. Among them are disaster recovery scenarios. We do have ours and I'm expecting any company for a cloud-hosted solution to have theirs.

meaty 14y ago
This is precisely why we have a self host requirement for all of our software. We did have a ton of stuff in salesforce but due to a number of problems with salesforce availability and the inevitable problem of relying on British Telecom's infrastructure monkeys, it got moved to a locally hosted dynamics CRM solution with off site transaction log shipping should the office catch fire. Cost a small fortune but there is nothing more expensive than not being there for your paying customers.
- kami8845 14y ago
  If you don't mind my asking, who is `we` in this?
  - meaty 14y ago
    We have a comms NDA which prevents me revealing the company name but we're in the financial sector and are an old fashioned "enterprise company".
- kranner 14y ago
  Judging by current Twitter traffic for @trello, there is a clear need for a self-hosted version.
  - tghw 14y ago
    That's not going to happen.
    - jonny_eh 14y ago
      It'd be a smart way for them to finally make money off of it.
      - tghw 14y ago
        I'm no longer with the company, so I may be out of date, but the consensus was that it was just too expensive to support licensed products if it weren't necessary. The thing that people don't take into account is that there are an endless number of server configurations that can screw up the application, and for a small company, dealing with each one of those is quite expensive. So what's the alternative? Keep it hosted-only. The downside is that, yes, outages like this happen. But I would argue that, on the whole, the overall Trello downtime has been far less than the cumulative downtime of people trying to run it themselves. Moreover, this was an extremely unusual storm. Buoys reported waves 5 times higher than anything on record. My guess is, the cost-benefit analysis is still solidly in on the side of having a hosted product in an easily accessible data center.
  - shadytrees 14y ago
    Based on my past experience working on self-hosted Kiln, I firmly believe creating a self-hosted version would cost more than it would rake in. It's different for every product and it's different for every company, though. (Sorry for the conversation derail.)
- dholowiski 14y ago
  Fogbugz has a self hosted version too, it's your choice which one to use.
- cube13 14y ago
  The opposite is what happened with the company I work for. They brought all the email server management in-house, probably cost a lot of money, took a while, and when they finally turned it on... half the company was without reliable email for about a month.
oconnore 14y ago
Do you think that your company could do this better at a reasonable cost? How would your company handle a scenario like this internally (an entire data center becomes unrecoverable)? If you don't have a good answer, it's simply grass-is-greener thinking.
- larrys 14y ago
  "reasonable cost?" The "reasonable cost" is a good point of course. Also relative to what they are able to charge and how that would change their business model. One type of customer might be willing to pay for a more robust service, others wouldn't. Take any garden variety website hosting service where the charge is under $10 per month and try to operate it giving better uptime and charging, say, $20 per month and see your customer base vanish. People expect it to work 24x7 but aren't willing to pay for it. They would rather take their chances. That said one thing they might be able to do at a "reasonable" cost is simply spread their customer base over multiple data centers. So the failure of one would only bring down a smaller percentage of their customers.
  - FireBeyond 14y ago
    Ironic, given your comment, that FogBugz is $25-30/user/month, and aimed at non-individuals, typically, so teams and above, so a client could easily be paying Fog Creek hundreds or more a month.
- dredmorbius 14y ago
  Honestly, it's not FC vs. self-hosted, it's FC vs. an alternate product. Preferably one not locate in a hurricane path, flood plain, earthquake zone, fire area, landslide track, or subject to political or economic instability. Or highly redundant with tested failover paths. All of which costs money, and still doesn't assure reliability. Look at last week's AWS EBS outage and root cause analysis: the service was brought down by its own monitoring (exacerbating an existing memory bug). It's not easy. Sandy is the most extreme hurricane to hit NYC in a century (though the second in as many years). NYC is a sufficiently important commerce and financial hub to have excellent services and recovery capabilities, but it still isn't immune to perturbations.

by jwr 14y ago

meaty 14y ago

This is precisely why we have a self host requirement for all of our software. We did have a ton of stuff in salesforce but due to a number of problems with salesforce availability and the inevitable problem of relying on British Telecom's infrastructure monkeys, it got moved to a locally hosted dynamics CRM solution with off site transaction log shipping should the office catch fire. Cost a small fortune but there is nothing more expensive than not being there for your paying customers.

kami8845 14y ago
If you don't mind my asking, who is `we` in this?
- meaty 14y ago
  We have a comms NDA which prevents me revealing the company name but we're in the financial sector and are an old fashioned "enterprise company".
kranner 14y ago
Judging by current Twitter traffic for @trello, there is a clear need for a self-hosted version.
- tghw 14y ago
  That's not going to happen.
  - jonny_eh 14y ago
    It'd be a smart way for them to finally make money off of it.
    - tghw 14y ago
      I'm no longer with the company, so I may be out of date, but the consensus was that it was just too expensive to support licensed products if it weren't necessary. The thing that people don't take into account is that there are an endless number of server configurations that can screw up the application, and for a small company, dealing with each one of those is quite expensive. So what's the alternative? Keep it hosted-only. The downside is that, yes, outages like this happen. But I would argue that, on the whole, the overall Trello downtime has been far less than the cumulative downtime of people trying to run it themselves. Moreover, this was an extremely unusual storm. Buoys reported waves 5 times higher than anything on record. My guess is, the cost-benefit analysis is still solidly in on the side of having a hosted product in an easily accessible data center.
- shadytrees 14y ago
  Based on my past experience working on self-hosted Kiln, I firmly believe creating a self-hosted version would cost more than it would rake in. It's different for every product and it's different for every company, though. (Sorry for the conversation derail.)
dholowiski 14y ago
Fogbugz has a self hosted version too, it's your choice which one to use.
cube13 14y ago
The opposite is what happened with the company I work for. They brought all the email server management in-house, probably cost a lot of money, took a while, and when they finally turned it on... half the company was without reliable email for about a month.

oconnore 14y ago

Do you think that your company could do this better at a reasonable cost? How would your company handle a scenario like this internally (an entire data center becomes unrecoverable)? If you don't have a good answer, it's simply grass-is-greener thinking.

larrys 14y ago
"reasonable cost?" The "reasonable cost" is a good point of course. Also relative to what they are able to charge and how that would change their business model. One type of customer might be willing to pay for a more robust service, others wouldn't. Take any garden variety website hosting service where the charge is under $10 per month and try to operate it giving better uptime and charging, say, $20 per month and see your customer base vanish. People expect it to work 24x7 but aren't willing to pay for it. They would rather take their chances. That said one thing they might be able to do at a "reasonable" cost is simply spread their customer base over multiple data centers. So the failure of one would only bring down a smaller percentage of their customers.
- FireBeyond 14y ago
  Ironic, given your comment, that FogBugz is $25-30/user/month, and aimed at non-individuals, typically, so teams and above, so a client could easily be paying Fog Creek hundreds or more a month.
dredmorbius 14y ago
Honestly, it's not FC vs. self-hosted, it's FC vs. an alternate product. Preferably one not locate in a hurricane path, flood plain, earthquake zone, fire area, landslide track, or subject to political or economic instability. Or highly redundant with tested failover paths. All of which costs money, and still doesn't assure reliability. Look at last week's AWS EBS outage and root cause analysis: the service was brought down by its own monitoring (exacerbating an existing memory bug). It's not easy. Sandy is the most extreme hurricane to hit NYC in a century (though the second in as many years). NYC is a sufficiently important commerce and financial hub to have excellent services and recovery capabilities, but it still isn't immune to perturbations.