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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Just like in the case of Trello if you already have the experience you can probably save money if you use what you already know how to use. In almost all other cases open source stacks are cheaper.

Stackoverflow and Trello are always held up as the shining examples of how the Microsoft stack is able to hold its own. That's great, I even know people that insist on running their web servers on Apple hardware. Whatever floats your boat. But if you're running a competitive business, if you're going to be using a lot of CPUs and if you will eventually (or already) be faced with lean and mean competition then you are probably better off on an open stack.

Try to imagine Google, Amazon, Ebay, DropBox or AirBnB on the Microsoft platform. And note that two of the above are re-selling their linux based platforms to other users at a profit.

Btw stackoverflow uses plenty of CentOS, I guess licensing from RedHat was too expensive?

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Big names mean nothing. You are not Google, they have very different requirements to you and their scale is much larger than your startup will ever be.

Microsoft aren't stupid - the costs they charge for Azure are largely competitive, and the benefits it provides are tangible.

Picking what technology will run your business is something that really needs to be done on a case by case basis, based on your knowledge and your business. Certainly I don't think it's desirable to make a permanent choice when you are still a startup.

Of course you'd use CentOS, unless you had need of the specific features that licensing it gave you.

> Picking what technology will run your business is something that really needs to be done on a case by case basis, based on your knowledge and your business.

We're definitely in agreement there. The main criterium is: use what you know how to use. So if you're comfortable using the MS stack then go for it, otherwise, probably better to avoid it.

> The main criterium is: use what you know how to use. So if you're comfortable using the MS stack then go for it, otherwise, probably better to avoid it.

So, would it be fair to say "So if you're comfortable using the Linux stack then go for it, otherwise, probably better to avoid it", or was that your parting jab against MS?

No, since Linux & FreeBSD are license free they have intrinsic advantages over Microsoft.

Yet we see that StackOverflow is fast and scaling really well with demand while Reddit still has load issues after seven years.

Reddit has rather more complex database queries than StackOverflow so that's not really apples to apples

Genuinely curious as to how you came to that conclusion.From the outside looking in, they both look like they would serve similar queries.

On top of that, SO's search feature is (IMHO) loads better than Reddit's.

StackOverflow uses ElasticSearch (open source, Java) for search.

Reddit does get about 15x the traffic SO does. But there are too many confounding variables to draw any conclusions about Linux vs. Windows.

This will factor in, but you can't make such sweeping statements - many parts of different stacks have their own intrinsic advantages.

Certainly, a silicon valley company of 10-20 employees will likely have costs of over $1000 a day - any software or hardware licensing will pale in comparison to this until the product is big.

Yes, it is possible (and common) to run Linux or one of the BSDs for free. But at large scale, a lot of people opt to pay one of Red Hat/Oracle/SuSE/Canonical/etc. for their free Linux ANYWAY. Buying Windows also means buying support. How much of this cost advantage goes away if you're paying Red Hat et al support fees?

The fact that you guys are even talking about "buying windows" and "buying support" when talking about buying into the Windows Azure stack shows that you most likely haven't used it much, if at all, and aren't quite sure what you're talking about.

I haven't used it much; I have used AWS a bit more, and there I recall you had to pay more if you wanted an instance on Windows or on RHEL proper rather than using CentOS or Debian. Those costs probably do add up to a lot more as you scale up (although it's silly to look at that in isolation). But he's comparing using Azure to self-hosting on your own hardware, I think.

Yeah, you don't pay extra for Windows itself on Azure, costs the same for a 2012 R2 DataCenter VM as it does for a small 2008 worker role, as it does for a Linux VM. You would have to pay for software like Oracle or SQL Server though, obviously.

Also, we don't have to worry about managing VMs at all so we don't generally think about those sorts of things except for a couple of very niche uses like our chat bot or QA testing VMs.

I read it as saying that the benefits of not basing your business on a proprietary platform are lower than the benefits of going with a stack that you already have some expertise at. You may read differently.

Trello is based on Node and Mongo on Ubuntu; there's no Windows in it. Kiln and FogBugz are based on C# and SQL Server on Windows and Java and Python Debian. Stack is based on C# and SQL Server on Windows and Redis and infrastructure on CentOS. This isn't about saving money or not; its about using the right tool for the right job, factoring in cost of tooling and cost of development. I think you're oversimplifying in your analysis

Even Apple was running iCloud off AWS and Azure before they ramped up their own data centers. I don't think you can get any more competitive than Apple in the tech world.

eBay's frontend is mostly Java on Windows. Many thousands of servers running Windows. Their search grid was on Solaris but has migrated to Linux in the last year or so (2013?).

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