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Comment by matwood | Hacker News Reader

Where do you just throw a couple racks of computers? Closet? Sounds great, now let's deal with cooling them and the maintenance around that. Then there is power. You think your standard office had all the necessary circuits to drive a couple racks full of servers?

There is so much more to running a server farm than just buying a couple racks of computers and upgrading the FiOS line.

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Yes, to all of that. Apparently you weren't around 15 years ago when startups pretty much had to do that if they wanted servers and an internet presence. I lived through a startup during that era and that exactly what we did. We had our fancy ISDN line and could server our web site to the world at a blistering 128K baud.

We bought a $300 air conditioner from Home Depot, cut a whole in the server room door with a sawzall and installed the air conditioner. Ok technically we only used the air conditioner in that configuration on the weekends when there was a human in the room and the main building air was off (we couldn't override it) but I like that story.

You're not going to get 5 nines this way, but you would be surprised at how much you can do, even when there exactly zero dedicated sysadmins.

Having helped put together at least half a dozen such rooms over the year (not an expert, but I can cobble together hardware into a 1u and 2u case as well as anybody and then screw them into a rack) I'm frankly surprised by the lack of both can-do attitude and basic know how here on HN. There's a weird notion here that additional lines can't be run for more bandwidth, and electricians don't exist who can come run more circuits to give you enough amperage for a few racks full of systems. Does anybody do anything for themselves anymore? This stuff isn't rocket science and it's not that hard to do on your own.

And it's surprisingly less hardware than most people think. Stack Overflow runs off of two machines. A few pieces of decent networking equipment and some fans and they're probably not even consuming half a rack.

Turns out running their own hardware is exactly what they ended up doing and even with staff and other costs, runs a fraction of AWS. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7155165

I know it is possible, and have also done it. I just get tired of people saying you can match what AWS provides for less money in house by buying some servers and upgrading your FiOS line. It is disingenuous and simply not true.

In reality the sweet spot is in the planning. If talking about only compute, colo your 24/7 servers and spin up extra capacity when needed in the cloud provider of your choice (what Moz appears to be moving towards).

Something we make heavy use of is Glacier and I don't know of a good alternative on that front.

Well you can't match what AWS provides. Almost nobody strictly can. But it's over-engineered and more than what most businesses could ever possibly need or want. Some questions, does your English only web startup really need redundancy in 30+ countries? Do you really need five 9 reliability or can you get by just fine with four 9s? etc.

For what 95% of the people here on HN need, 2 or 3 decent servers running off of a business FiOS line will be more than adequate for even their wildest ambitions. 99% of the remainder could make do with a rack or two of equipment, a generator, dedicated a/c and some loving electrician work. And even then if they need quick surge capacity expansion, they can still bring in AWS to augment their home-rolled stuff.

If keeping your stuff in-house isn't sexy enough, colo'ing it is still cheaper than AWS in most cases.

There's probably a fraction of 1% of the startups here that actually need what AWS offers. But the prevailing attitude here is that everybody's appointment reminder photo sharing web app is going to require AWS when they'd be perfectly well serviced, and be far more responsible with investor money, with something far less capable. The problem, as I'm seeing in the comments here, is that basic industry know-how (like how to assembly a reliable high-performance server from parts) seems to be largely absent in the industry.

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