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Comment by yingw787 | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, while I'd love to try this out, I'm afraid of committing to a solution that might not be around long-term, which for me at least overrides concerns of peace of mind and ease of use, and I'm doing a hobby project at the moment.

I'm using bare AWS at the moment because a) they gave me $5k in credits for YC SUS, b) they own the physical servers, and c) I can trust that they'll be around a long time, so I'd rather get locked into AWS proper rather than a service that might be built on top of AWS (e.g. CloudFormation vs. Terraform).

But I get, better than I did two months ago, just how freaking hard it is to build something, anything. This is amazing work, and I couldn't do it. Kudos to you, and I look forward to hearing about your amazing success!

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We're not AWS, but: 1) we own physical servers and 2) we're profitable 3) have big public companies as customers.

Oh woah, profitable and own physical servers? You guys are gonna be just fine :)

Physical servers in Vultr right? I believe your geo regions are the same.

So far only Packet, but we'll be expanding soon

edit: those regions are the same because it's the easiest set of cities to roll this out in :)

Congrats! I can see a lot of use cases for picking just a small subset of cities/regions and skipping Google/Amazon/Azure altogether.

Weirdly I feel like the fact that you are profitable and have large customers could be as important a part of your customer pitch as it is your investor pitch - even if the tech is awesome that trust in the organization to stick around is super important (just look at the trouble around stadia haha). It's like those fintech companies that have "but how do we make money?" To make sure customers know "ok they can make money without screwing me over or ending up having to shut down"

> 1) we own physical servers and 2) we're profitable 3) have big public companies as customers

Ironically, these also make you a prime acquisition target (because the product idea rocks), which renders your long-term future unclear.

I was at a company that got acquired before. It was so awful. I'd rather just work on this forever than get absorbed by a big company.

> I was at a company that got acquired before. It was so awful. I'd rather just work on this forever than get absorbed by a big company.

How do your investors feel about this / what's your exit plan?

We feel great about Fly.io :) (I am their group partner at YC)

Could you elaborate? :) Because otherwise, you're possibly sending the same message as what I alluded to (i.e., we feel great because we're expecting a big exit).

Well, whoever buys them would like to keep the customers, as it is already a profitable business. So, even if they completely close the business, they should provide a way to migrate, as nobody likes to loose money/customers.

"I won't use anything from smaller or new companies or Google in case it goes away". That's silly, how is this the top comment? Are people that conservative in tech of all places? This is a docker runtime. If it goes away you'll be up and running again without delay on AWS or anywhere else, you just won't have the edge performance characteristics.

Yes, I'm very conservative. I'm in tech because I want to compound my achievements over time, and I can't do that if I fear the ground shifting underneath my feet. Hence Bezo's mantra "focus on the things that don't change". I hate O(N) efforts, I prefer O(N log N) efforts or better.

Enterprise workloads are far more conservative than I am, those guys spend decades running the same servers. It's why they can focus on sales and customer success and rake in money, which is what actually puts food on the table for their kids.

Depending on the region your infrastructure is located in, AWS doesn't own the datacenter.

For example in the Paris (eu-west-3) region, their availability zones are operated on hardware owned and managed by Telehouse, Interxion and Equinix.

Huh, interesting, I didn't know this. Thanks so much for sharing! Do you have a link? I searched and found all three companies, but I only see links to AWS Direct Connect and hybrid cloud solutions.

I just assumed if they're creating their own chips, they're probably creating their own servers, datacenters, networks, etc. but I guess I shouldn't jump to conclusions.

Datacenters are weird. They're basically a real estate market, check out Digital Realty Trust: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Realty

Networks are crazy too, especially between continents, ownership of undersea cables is fascinating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_communications_cable

https://www.interxion.com/sites/default/files/2020-01/paris-...

I'm guessing it's likely that this solution was adopted to quickly expand to a lot of countries due to data location and privacy questions being raised.

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