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Hosting and rackspace matter a WHOLE lot if computers are central to your business. Would a bank get started without a vault? Can you build a house without a

Hosting and rackspace matter a WHOLE lot if computers are central to your business. Would a bank get started without a vault? Can you build a house without a foundation? The point is as cheap as possible... not as cheap as cheap... If you're going to end up with a lot of servers: get into rackspace NOW and develop a relationship with the datacenter. If computers are at the center of your business then you owe it to your business to house them with the same care you would your employees. Or, you could grow it ad-hoc and deal with serious downtime and expansion issues later and attendant costs. Choice is yours. I would consider how well you like stress before deciding. Convincing people to use their own computers is epic fail if you have intellectual property issues (or think you might in the future.) If your employee is going to sign an NDA under no circumstances should you allow them to use their own computers. Also, varying degrees of attention are paid to things like vulnerabilities and stability as well as standards. If your relying upon yourself to do IT, then you're automatically setting yourself up for connecting ten different computers in 15 different ways. This does not scale. Then of course, you'll have the hotshot programmer who'll set up his own sourcecode repository and you'll have no end of headaches getting the two repositories to agree. If you're going to rely on computers with minimal IT staff then you need to go cookie-cutter approach in the beginning and set up definitive rules like "a server is a server" and "a desktop is not a server".

deleted 17y ago
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justin_vanw 17y ago
There is no reason to own your own servers. Putting them in EC2 saves you lots of money and more importantly time, and allows for scalability which would be almost impossible with physical servers. Additionally, there is no large up front cost, it requires no physical presence at a data center to manage, and there are no hardware issues to resolve, be it failed drives, UPS fiddling to keep power use evenly distributed, it goes on forever. The advice given in the parent post is, frankly, uninformed (or at the very least 5 years out of date). For a startup, you don't want to blow a bunch of cash up front because you don't know what your requirements are going to be in the long run. It is very common to blow a bunch of cash on equipment and have it sit idle until it is obsolete, or realize later that it is not what you needed. Finally, an NDA does basically nothing for you. 'Great ideas' are worthless, and most source code is worthless as well. It's all about execution. If you had every line of source code ever written for youtube.com you would have no advantage whatsoever, it would get you nowhere. Companies that do create code that is very valueable can often give it away for free, see danga interactive and memcached, or the reams of code facebook and google give out, and these are not open source companies. Very, very occasionally certain very difficult problems will be solved, and that code is valuable (for example, suppose fedex developed software that routed packages with 10% greater efficiency than anyone else could achieve) but here again the code is worthless, the algorithm is what is valuable. The algorithm can be patented, so here again, the code itself is worthless to competitors. Example: Adaptive Replacement Cache "Also, varying degrees of attention are paid to things like vulnerabilities and stability as well as standards. If your relying upon yourself to do IT, then you're automatically setting yourself up for connecting ten different computers in 15 different ways. This does not scale." -- This doesn't mean anything as far as I can tell. I honestly cannot figure out what your point was here, or if there was one beyond fitting as many words commonly used in technology discussions in a single paragraph. If you can't figure out source control, you might as well give up now. It is a basic, entry level task in software development. "... rules like "a server is a server" and "a desktop is not a server"." -- Yep, you've lost me. Either you are saying something super obvious, equivalent to "a door is not a window", or you are speaking the gibberish.

deleted 17y ago

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justin_vanw 17y ago

There is no reason to own your own servers. Putting them in EC2 saves you lots of money and more importantly time, and allows for scalability which would be almost impossible with physical servers. Additionally, there is no large up front cost, it requires no physical presence at a data center to manage, and there are no hardware issues to resolve, be it failed drives, UPS fiddling to keep power use evenly distributed, it goes on forever. The advice given in the parent post is, frankly, uninformed (or at the very least 5 years out of date). For a startup, you don't want to blow a bunch of cash up front because you don't know what your requirements are going to be in the long run. It is very common to blow a bunch of cash on equipment and have it sit idle until it is obsolete, or realize later that it is not what you needed. Finally, an NDA does basically nothing for you. 'Great ideas' are worthless, and most source code is worthless as well. It's all about execution. If you had every line of source code ever written for youtube.com you would have no advantage whatsoever, it would get you nowhere. Companies that do create code that is very valueable can often give it away for free, see danga interactive and memcached, or the reams of code facebook and google give out, and these are not open source companies. Very, very occasionally certain very difficult problems will be solved, and that code is valuable (for example, suppose fedex developed software that routed packages with 10% greater efficiency than anyone else could achieve) but here again the code is worthless, the algorithm is what is valuable. The algorithm can be patented, so here again, the code itself is worthless to competitors. Example: Adaptive Replacement Cache "Also, varying degrees of attention are paid to things like vulnerabilities and stability as well as standards. If your relying upon yourself to do IT, then you're automatically setting yourself up for connecting ten different computers in 15 different ways. This does not scale." -- This doesn't mean anything as far as I can tell. I honestly cannot figure out what your point was here, or if there was one beyond fitting as many words commonly used in technology discussions in a single paragraph. If you can't figure out source control, you might as well give up now. It is a basic, entry level task in software development. "... rules like "a server is a server" and "a desktop is not a server"." -- Yep, you've lost me. Either you are saying something super obvious, equivalent to "a door is not a window", or you are speaking the gibberish.