Note that Nova didn't feel an actual hardware capacity level was hit here. However, the setup lacked the redundancy to handle hardware outages for something like drive replacements without a significant outage. And I believe one of the main considerations in moving to a cloud service was actually limited connectivity options, because only so much fiber capacity was even available.

> Our limiting factor in Hachyderm had almost nothing to do with the amount of users accessing the system as much as it did the amount of data we were federating. Our system would have flapped if we had 100 users, or if we had 1,000,000 users. We were nowhere close to hitting limits of DB size, storage size, or network capacity. We just had bad disks.

hacker news: you don't need the cloud! you can just run a couple machines in your basement!

also hacker news: why would you try to run something in your basement? Just use the cloud!

> committing money to specific hardware

Note that Dell R620 and R630 servers have been discontinued for a couple of years now, were probably bought used, and can probably be re-sold.