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Comment by judofyr | Hacker News Reader

> If you’re running a website where extended outages are no big deal and you don’t care about lost revenue, then it’s not really a valid comparison to the typical business website.

I think you're severely underestimating how many businesses make a significant amount of money from their website, but doesn't actually have full-time developer available. An extended outage would cause significant revenue loss, but it's typically not a problem because outages are surprisingly rare when you (1) have a very stable traffic pattern and (2) you don't spend a lot of time adding features and refactoring. Pretty much every cloud outage we've seen was caused by a human configuration error, not fault machines.

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> I think you're severely underestimating how many businesses make a significant amount of money from their website, but doesn't actually have full-time developer available.

No, I’m well aware. But there’s a simple solution to this problem: Don’t try to run and maintain your own servers. Pay a little extra to use cloud hosting and let it be someone else’s problem.

I take issue with these calls to setup and maintain your own custom solutions and servers, while also suggesting that the cost of engineering and maintaining such a custom setup should be ignored.

Running your own servers and not having developers is a recipe for an endless stream of contracting invoices that are going to cost far, far more than just using a hosted cloud solution.

> pay a little extra

The whole idea is that it's not a little extra, but 2 orders of magnitude.

I'd be on board with "pay a little extra to rent dedicated servers", but "move to one of the big-three cloud providers" doesn't sound like a sound financial decision for the case presented.

> No, I’m well aware.

No, apparently not.

> But there’s a simple solution to this problem: Don’t try to run and maintain your own servers. Pay a little extra to use cloud hosting and let it be someone else’s problem.

But that's only if it IS a "problem" in the first place. You have defined it as such, although Bitecode themselves said that for them, it simply isn't. (To paraphrase: "If the site is down, then it's down; so what? We'll fix it when we're in the office again.")

Just plain ignoring whether something is "a problem" or not is hardly being "well aware".

> An extended outage would cause significant revenue loss, but it’s typically not a problem

This just seems like a bad decision from a business perspective. You are willing to endure a significant outage that will cost a lot of money but not pay to prevent it? Machines can and will fail.

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