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meaty

it does. When I want it to, not when I don't want it to.

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What? If keeping uptime of a server was as easy as wishful thinking, we'd see a lot more of REAL 99.9% uptime.

The trick is to want it to be down when you notice that it's down.

I like it, for my next hosting company: We don't have downtime, just unscheduled maintenance.

That's called Enterprise Hosting and it comes at E10k/server/month excluding bandwidth. I wish I was joking.

  "One must require from each one the duty which each one can perform," the king
  went on. "Accepted authority rests first of all on reason. If you ordered your people
  to go and throw themselves into the sea, they would rise up in revolution. I have the
  right to require obedience because my orders are reasonable."

  "Then my sunset?" the little prince reminded him: for he never forgot a question once
  he had asked it.

  "You shall have your sunset. I shall command it. But, according to my science of 
  government, I shall wait until conditions are favorable."

  "When will that be?" inquired the little prince.

  "Hum! Hum!" replied the king; and before saying anything else he consulted a bulky
  almanac. "Hum! Hum! That will be about--about--that will be this evening about twenty
  minutes to eight. And you will see how well I am obeyed!"

http://www.angelfire.com/hi/littleprince/framechapter10.html

"I meant to do that!"

I think what he's trying to say is his downtime is planned - kernel upgrades, configuration changes, that sort of thing.

This is both somewhat true and somewhat not true. He's still vulnerable to failure of the hosting equipment and attacks from crackers. But, when he's the only admin, there's nobody else to fat-finger the server out of action, and if he only logs into the shell for service he will never fat-finger outside of planned service.

Hardware breakages and Zero-Day exploits usually tend to show up at most inconvenient times. I'd recommend everybody to not own an email server from a pure business perspective, unless you're a mail server admin anyways. There's so much time you can sink in it and still not achieve the level of security and uptime a quality email host will reach for much less money.

Now, there are arguments to run your own mailserver - you get to configure it exactly the way you want, you might see it as a hobby, ... But from a pure financial point of view it doesn't make sense.

I know. If you read my comment, you should notice I did not pretend attackers are not a threat.

Right, I somehow missed that part. Sorry about that :)

I know what he meant, but it's not like google is improvising with gmail. The site is already up by the way, it's been years since they have a more than 5 minute downtime. Also, you can never dream of having the same kind of redundancy as gmail will have nor the collective man hours spent in the project. I don't hate the idea of self hosting your mail, I just think it's ridiculous to say you'll have a better service than gmail when you have much better arguments like privacy, control and ownership.

Availability covers data loss and account cancellations out of the blue, which has happened to a friend of mine at least. this is one of the reasons I self host.

Also, the machine is in the same lan as me so connectivity is never a problem (unless the cat chews through the ethernet cables again).

So you have redundant internet connections, back-up power generators, a high availability cluster, etc? That seems like a lot of money just to host your own mail server.

- I've run my home server. They would crash randomly and usually when something else in the house like a water heater had broken.

- I've run pay servers in the cloud. Then they magically disappear because the expiration date on my credit card updated and the best way for GoDaddy to tell me was to wipe it and then send me an email.

- I've tried free servers. I got what I paid for.

Whatever problems GMail has (and it does have problems), it's not those. Absolutely everything else has left a taste of ashes in my mouth.

Pay for servers from someone other than GoDaddy--almost anyone else, really. Home servers are a really bad solution for anything remotely important, but shared hosting from the likes of Dreamhost, VPS from a company like Linode, or EC2 instances from Amazon are all fast, reliable, and cheap.

It was actually Dotster, not GoDaddy. I misspoke.

I don't mind paying, but what happens if there is a disruption in payment methods? I'm busy, and I'm also spread very thin on "things I can concentrate on." If my credit card expires without me noticing, I don't want all code and data on the VPS to vanish on me.

Your credit card expiring will presumably cause problems with more than one service; I recommend trying really hard to keep track of that date. (There must be a calendar you can put it in?) Most good hosts will disconnect you before wiping your drive, and will send you several emails (over the course of months) before that happens. But if whatever you're doing now works, even better!

Redundant connection - check 3g. Backup supply - check (fucking big aps). Ha cluster - yes i can fail to a vm on my desktop.

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