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Comment by mwcampbell | Hacker News Reader

> running a simple VPS on something like OVH/DigitalOcean/Linode is a matter of creating the instance, setting the size, and setting up your server software. Super simple, and likely about the same complexity as setting up a dev environment.

Until that server goes down.

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Sure but sometimes that’s ok. Everything goes down sometimes. You need to figure out how much effort you’re willing to expend for each extra “9”.

I wonder what percentage of all sites hosted at AWS are actually ready for a zone to fail.

# uptime 01:43:36 up 666 days, 11:42, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.03, 0.01

From OVH VPS. Funny thing it's 666 today. YMMV

# uptime 01:47:03 up 640 days, 6:53, 2 users, load average: 2.39, 2.62, 2.73

From hetzner dedicated server. YMMV

# uptime 01:48:11 up 482 days, 20 min, 2 users, load average: 1.53, 2.10, 2.78

From leaseweb dedicated server. YMMV

Please patch your systems.

Why would you leave a server running that long? Is that best practice? I'm by no means a sysadmin but I do monthly scheduled reboots, because on monthly reboots you test that reboot gets you a running server that correctly comes back, and you get a more thorough fsck.

Also not a sysadmin, but regular reboots are a must-have. Not only does it test that the machine comes back up, but it will also ensure that your kernel and other services are patched. Of course, the services can also be restarted separately after an update, but swapping the running kernel with a new one is still very uncommon.

Digital ocean droplet:

03:48:56 up 238 days, 15:04, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.05

I'd say the risks of a server going down are about the same as an AWS setup going haywire at that level.

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