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Comment by basilikum | Hacker News Reader

HN is a pretty simple, efficient monolithic web application. Some updates might need a restart. It's OK for some web requests to fail during that time. HN isn't life critical with sixtuple nine uptime requirements.

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Tbh like 99% of web apps aren’t critical - most of them are for buying something or providing infrastructure to make it easier to buy something anyway. It’s fine if your online shop is down for a few minutes (of course the business won’t see it like that but it’s true)

A sales site being down might lose you a sale. But the simplicity might save you so muh more than that loses you. And often the complexion of high availability infrastructure results in more downtime than it prevents.

For stuff like HN, I like the peek behind the scenes it provides. It's all just software written by some humans and way too often people take themselves and their shitty software way too serious.

B&H is doing fine financially and brings their webstore down for each and every Sabbath, even if that happens to be a Black Friday.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12183263

Steam, +130 million users, biggest gamming store, multi billion dolar company, is offline every week for a few minutes.

99.999999 is so overated.

It could probably be done with a simple if statement, but I'm guessing that dang enjoys the tradition of doing it manually every year.

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