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Their choice to use cloud services makes perfect sense. It will enable them to create new servers on the fly, when required, as well as resizing and allocating
by milestinsley 17y ago
Their choice to use cloud services makes perfect sense. It will enable them to create new servers on the fly, when required, as well as resizing and allocating resources as needed, keeping costs down and efficiency high.
It inspires me that we have these cloud services at our disposal. And maybe Posterous (and many other great startups) would not have been conceived without the founders having access to such technology.
- jacquesm 17y agoIt's the 'keeping costs down' bit that I have a problem with, I have to date not found any evidence that that is the case. Whether you lease or buy your servers, if you have a > 30% 'on' pattern and use anything but trivial bandwidth then using a cloud instead is very expensive. Sure you can instantly call up more instances, but there are only a limited number of cases for which that is true, and almost none of them involve web based services (which are pretty much 'on' all the time, with some fluctuations because of the day/night shift).
- psranga 17y agoAvoiding upfront costs helps lengthening the startup's runway, even if total cost until time=infinity is higher. Building fault-tolerance (like S3/EBS do) is a HARD problem. That's worth paying for. Once you move your data to the cloud for reliability, you almost have to move the processing close to the data to get acceptable performance.