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Comment by z3t4 | Hacker News Reader

When choosing a big cloud provider people forget that it's many orders of magnitude more complicated to run something at Google scale then to maintain one single server. For example the whole Stack overflow website runs on one or two servers. World of Warcraft also used to run on one single (blade) server. Chances are one server will be good enough for most use cases. And if you don't want to have it in your closet there are plenty of dedicated hosting and colocations.

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>World of Warcraft also used to run on one single (blade) server.

This is... kind of true, but not really. For a single realm, general game interactions in the open world might have been hosted on a single blade, but there are a lot of support systems that do as much work, or more, that were not. The databases with all of the character information, login servers, instance servers, etc. etc. etc.

But even if you look at just the game server portion, there was a blade for every realm - you can't say World of Warcraft as a monolithic entity ran on a single blade server.

(I'm also not sure if the general game servers for a realm were only on one blade - my understanding is that each "continent" was it's own blade - Kalimdor, Eastern Kingdoms, Northrend, Outland, etc.)

With a cloud it also means that when there is an outage there are potentially many sites/services affected all at once, and there is potentially nothing customers can do to fix it other than wait (or plan in advance, and use/pay for multi-AZ/multi-region/multi-provider redundancy). Such outages are also possible with traditional hosting providers, and when an outage does happen I'm not convinced whether a large public cloud would recover more quickly (due to better resourcing/expertise available to fix the problem), or a small hosting provider (which may have a smaller team, but the problems they deal with are at a smaller scale and more easily fixable). Either way you probably want some kind of CDN independent of your cloud/hosting provider that can help survive some of these glitches.

How can Stack Overflow run on a single server? Do you mean single cluster?

As of 2016, Stack Overflow ran on dozens of servers in two data centers.

https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/03/29/stack-overflow-the-ha...

Also interesting what their minimum requirements were in 2014 :https://nickcraver.com/blog/2013/11/22/what-it-takes-to-run-...

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