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> which belies deep misunderstanding I think you are missing the point. When I state my Exchange server is more reliable than Exchange Online, I don't think I'

> which belies deep misunderstanding I think you are missing the point. When I state my Exchange server is more reliable than Exchange Online, I don't think I'm a better engineer. I recognize Microsoft has harder problems to solve than I do. I think building overengineered, oversized SaaS environments is introducing extreme risk. It's an inherent flaw of the current approach. Smaller is, in fact, better, because it's easier to operate reliably.

toomuchtodo 17d ago
Indeed, the scale Anon1096 refers to wrt distributed systems is anti pattern. It is designed to vacuum up revenue and create enterprise value with scale, not to create resiliency for customers (although resiliency might be a byproduct of a well architected and operated distributed system at scale). "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." -- Da Vinci
- a_conservative 17d ago
  Hidden in this discussion around self-hosting reliability are other options as well. Depending on your time and appetite for tinkering with all of this, it's not hard to imagine a home setup that fails over to a cheap Hetzner or DO VM. A manual failover at the DNS level isn't overly complex, and could be scripted. Keeping a database in sync between home and the instance might be simple or more complex depending on needs, but would it really be that hard to have Claude help you setup a replicating Postgres server? If your database (or data files) are 1 gigabyte and don't update that often... maybe just rsync it every night or something There's a thread you and others are pulling on here, and we need to pull it. Hosting doesn't have to be the domain of the big vendors anymore.
  - toomuchtodo 17d ago
    That was my intent, pull the thread.
jedberg 17d ago
Is it? When your internet is out for five days because your ISP takes a few days to get to you, do you acknowledge that you're now at 98.5% availability for the year, far worse than any SaaS email service? I think people forget that those large environments are there for a reason. To make sure the service stays up in the face of problems outside your own control.
- toomuchtodo 17d ago
  In my entire adult lifetime (mid 40s), my ISP has never been out for five days. Compare to Github, Microsoft, Salesforce, and AWS outages that are always occurring in some fashion. Reddit is down constantly in various ways and still continues to operate as a business, public no less, so I disagree about the need to chase five nines and broadly speaking, large distributed systems that are potentially unnecessary for the use case and target outcome. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=%22is%20down%22&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
  - jedberg 17d ago
    Consider yourself lucky that you’ve never been the victim of a fiber cut. But what about if the power to your house goes out? Or what if your server blows the power supply? My entire point is that you have no redundancy in your system and you also aren’t big enough to have any pull with the vendors who can fix these types of outages so you’re basically at the mercy of your providers with no recourse. That’s why these systems are built the way they are. And generally four nines is considered the gold standard these days. I can tell you for sure that both Netflix and Ebay would lose money anytime they drop below four nines because I have at some point been responsible for both. You’re correct that Reddit has a lot more leeway and outage time before they start losing money but not that much leeway.
    - toomuchtodo 17d ago
      I've contributed to building out data centers, as well as managed colos for others, primarily in downtown Chicago at Level3 and at 350 E Cermak. I am familiar with architecture required for reliability and diversity, from power and fiber in all the way up the stack to the Kubernetes cluster and software defined networking. If you participate in the capital markets, your data traverses systems I've participated in designing and implementing. There is a time and place for complexity (in this context, large/global distributed systems), but too often, complexity exists where it need not (imho).

toomuchtodo 17d ago

Indeed, the scale Anon1096 refers to wrt distributed systems is anti pattern. It is designed to vacuum up revenue and create enterprise value with scale, not to create resiliency for customers (although resiliency might be a byproduct of a well architected and operated distributed system at scale). "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." -- Da Vinci

a_conservative 17d ago
Hidden in this discussion around self-hosting reliability are other options as well. Depending on your time and appetite for tinkering with all of this, it's not hard to imagine a home setup that fails over to a cheap Hetzner or DO VM. A manual failover at the DNS level isn't overly complex, and could be scripted. Keeping a database in sync between home and the instance might be simple or more complex depending on needs, but would it really be that hard to have Claude help you setup a replicating Postgres server? If your database (or data files) are 1 gigabyte and don't update that often... maybe just rsync it every night or something There's a thread you and others are pulling on here, and we need to pull it. Hosting doesn't have to be the domain of the big vendors anymore.
- toomuchtodo 17d ago
  That was my intent, pull the thread.

jedberg 17d ago

Is it? When your internet is out for five days because your ISP takes a few days to get to you, do you acknowledge that you're now at 98.5% availability for the year, far worse than any SaaS email service? I think people forget that those large environments are there for a reason. To make sure the service stays up in the face of problems outside your own control.

toomuchtodo 17d ago
In my entire adult lifetime (mid 40s), my ISP has never been out for five days. Compare to Github, Microsoft, Salesforce, and AWS outages that are always occurring in some fashion. Reddit is down constantly in various ways and still continues to operate as a business, public no less, so I disagree about the need to chase five nines and broadly speaking, large distributed systems that are potentially unnecessary for the use case and target outcome. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=%22is%20down%22&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- jedberg 17d ago
  Consider yourself lucky that you’ve never been the victim of a fiber cut. But what about if the power to your house goes out? Or what if your server blows the power supply? My entire point is that you have no redundancy in your system and you also aren’t big enough to have any pull with the vendors who can fix these types of outages so you’re basically at the mercy of your providers with no recourse. That’s why these systems are built the way they are. And generally four nines is considered the gold standard these days. I can tell you for sure that both Netflix and Ebay would lose money anytime they drop below four nines because I have at some point been responsible for both. You’re correct that Reddit has a lot more leeway and outage time before they start losing money but not that much leeway.
  - toomuchtodo 17d ago
    I've contributed to building out data centers, as well as managed colos for others, primarily in downtown Chicago at Level3 and at 350 E Cermak. I am familiar with architecture required for reliability and diversity, from power and fiber in all the way up the stack to the Kubernetes cluster and software defined networking. If you participate in the capital markets, your data traverses systems I've participated in designing and implementing. There is a time and place for complexity (in this context, large/global distributed systems), but too often, complexity exists where it need not (imho).