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Comment by aledalgrande | Hacker News Reader

I'm just curious, because to me it seems a little bit unrealistic.

How do you handle traffic spikes, especially from the networking point of view? What kind of connection do you have? How do you make your service as fast for all customers around the world (saying you have a succesful Saas). How do you prevent a local blackout from taking down your service? Where do you store your backups, in case your building gets flooded or your machine blows up? What would you do in case a malicious process takes over the machine? These are some things that are managed in a cloud environment.

I understand investing in a datacenter rack where you own your hardware, if you have the skills, but running it in a home office cannot support a successful business nowadays IMO.

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I've been doing my own hosting for 20 years, this just doesn't happen often enough to concern myself with it.

You need to disassociate yourself from the start-up mindset when you DIY a side project app or site. Having said that, there are ways to cache and improve your write performance and maintain HA on a budget. The only thing that's hard to replicate in self-hosting is a high performance global presence.

CenturyLink provides me gigabit internet on a business connection. I get traffic spikes of ~100/rps and it's no problem. Could probably easily handle another order of magnitude or two. Local blackouts are mitigated with a UPS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uninterruptible_power_supply

To be fair, I'm not 100% off the cloud. Backups are on an hourly snapshot thru Restic https://restic.net/ and stored in Google Cloud Storage off-prem in case of catastrophes. Also, my Postgres database is hosted in Cloud SQL because frankly I'm not feeling experienced enough to try hosting a database myself right now.

It's really not as unrealistic as most people seem to think. People have been building online businesses for years without the cloud. Believing it's suddenly not possible is just their marketing going to work for them making them new customers imo.

> How do you handle traffic spikes, especially from the networking point of view?

I don't know about GP but managing your own server doesn't mean you cannot use a CDN with your webapp.

A CDN wouldn't be enough if the traffic spike involves writes.

Oh no a website went down! Oh, wait, that's not an emergency. Where did the idea that every site and service needs five nines availability come from? A side project goes down or is read only for a few hours. Who gives a shit? It's not an insulin pump or nuclear control rods. It's ok for people to be mildly inconvenienced for a short period of time.

"Always-on culture"

I guess people who use Twitter don't like seeing bad things written about them on Twitter. Though the solution is to disown Twitter and all who use it.

In my first job as a system tech for an IT company in 2014 we had a backup process run at 17:30 and whichever admin left last would take the backup HDD with them home lol. It worked! There was also onsite redundancy with replicated windows servers in an office across the street, which was enough. Simpler times even just 8 years ago!

Which is ok if there isn’t a local disaster which wipes out your office and your friends?

If there's a local disaster that wipes out your office and your friends and all you can think about is data then you should ask a professional to screen you for sociopathy and whether you have any treatable mental illness.

No shame in it, I myself have one, but you shouldn't be concerned with this scenario even if it happens.

Life is too short to waste on ruining your life over planning on how to ruin your life even further after a rare life ruining event has occurred. I doubt you'd be working, or having any real coherent thoughts, for many years in that scenario.

> If there's a local disaster that wipes out your office and your friends and all you can think about is data then you should ask a professional to screen you for sociopathy and whether you have any treatable mental illness.

So you'd lose your friends and potentially your livelihood and any ability to financial support yourself, or any surviving friends or family, just because you don't want to use cloud backups or a professional backup service with the correct contingencies in-place ?

One could easily imagine a less dramatic scenario where your office is close to your work, you go home with your backups in your backpack; However a flood hits your town, you accidentally leave your your backpack behind at evacuation time. Your office and home are flooded and then your backups and actual data set is destroyed, no one dies but you've lost your company and not just phsycial assets. Seems a little unnecessary ?

I actually have lived in towns where floods, lighting storms and tornadoes have caused situations where this scenario could've easily played out.

I also feel the need to point out there's no need to suggest people need a psychiatrist when planning for a worst case scenario, some people are are just prepared for the worst, whether or not it's just how they're born or their paid /trained to do so.

How many times have you known this to happen?

And how are you currently preparing your company against a solar flare?

I've definitely worked for companies where off-site backups are protected from the impacts of solar flares.

> How many times have you known this to happen?

That's irrelevant, if it can happen, it will happen, and it's too late once you've lost your data. Maybe for some businesses, data isn't important, but I don't know of many?

Born, raised, and never moved out of tornado alley. Work for a major university, our university wide "off-site" backups are a datacenter across the street except for critical student information that is encrypted cloud backed up. We understand fatalism with tornado sirens every 10am the first Tuesday of the month.

What I'm against isn't the cloud existing, it's your 24x7 uptime guarantee during the equivalent of Hurricane Katrina at the cost of over engineering.

If you're an engineer in that scenario, you're either running, helping clear debris, or giving first aid/supplies. Your computer is nonsense at that point and yes it's a sign of a problem if you are clinging onto your devices in such a disaster scenario.

EDIT: Just re-read, I might have gotten you confused with someone on a different thread entirely about Kubernetes... Maybe I typed on the wrong tab, oops. Your comment is about data not uptime.

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