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Comment by shubhamjain | Hacker News Reader

This is probably 5th or 6th major outage from Fly.io that I have personally seen. Pretty sure there were many others and some just went unnoticed. I recommended the service to a friend, and within two days he faced two outages.

Fly.io seriously needs to get it together. Why it hasn’t happened yet is a mystery to me. They have a good product but stability needs to be an absolute top for a hosting service. Everything else is secondary.

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I get this but I think if people can give GitHub a pass for shitting the bed every two weeks maybe Fly should get a bit of goodwill here. I am not affiliated with Fly at all but I do think that people should temper their expectations when even mega corp can’t get it right

I guess the secret is to be the incumbent with no suitable replacement. Then you can be complete garbage in terms of reliability and everyone will just hand wave away your poor ops story

The biggest difference is GitHub in your infrastructure is (nearly always) internal. Fly in your infrastructure is external. Users generally don't see when you have issues with GitHub, but they do generally see when you have issues with Fly.

That's the core difference.

Who's giving GitHub a pass on shitting the bed? They go down often enough that if you don't have an internal git server setup for your CICD to hit, that's on you.

My point is made by your very post - getting off GitHub onto alternatives is not seriously discussed as an option - instead it’s “well, why didn’t you prepare better to deal with your vendor’s poor ops story”

I wasn't going to bring up being on an internally hosted gitlab instead of github, but that would be the "not giving them a pass" part.

We left it about a year ago due to reliability issues. We now use digitalocean apps and working like a charm. Zero downtime with DO.

You mean their App Platform right? How does the pricing compare to fly?

Yes, App Platform. Pricing is a little higher but way lower than AWS but it is fully justified. Zero downtime in the last 1 year.

With Fly, we had 3-4 downtimes in 2023 in a span of 4 months.

Ok so for hobby projects it wouldn't make sense to switch then, but glad to hear it works for you. I haven't been in a position where it would make sense - I have hobby projects where I don't care much about reliability, and then there's the infrastructure the company I work for uses and that's all on AWS

Reliability is hard when your volume is (presumably) scaling geometrically.

Can't use the "reliability is hard" excuse when you are quite literally in the business of selling reliability.

It’s just not that big of a mystery. It’s not an excuse; it’s just true. Also, they’re not especially selling reliability as much as they’re selling small geo-distributed deployments.

Does anyone use them beyond the free tier? Same with Vercel for example.

Vercel has revenue of over $100M. So yes at least a few companies use them beyond the free tier.

Which company? GitHub? As far as I know fly.io does not have a free tier.

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