If a startup came to you with this sort of legacy thinking you'd laugh them out of the room. In many circles, you would be laughed out of the room for cargo cu

If a startup came to you with this sort of legacy thinking you'd laugh them out of the room. In many circles, you would be laughed out of the room for cargo culting like this, and for trying to draw a bias against a legitimate deployment choice by declaring it "legacy". There are many scenarios where hosting on your own hardware is a superior option for a variety of reasons: Financially, security, performance, flexibility. In the case of HN it seems like it's on some pretty meager hardware, making compromises like software RAID. If this were a critical system for YC, they would have it on redundant machines with redundant, flash-based, hardware-RAID equipped platforms, clustered with redundant 10Gb cross connects, etc. Criticizing a deployment strategy because of the peculiar issues they have faced is like writing off AWS because someone's unbacked up small instance got killed and they had no strategy for it.