Ask HN: How do you make sure your servers are up as a single founder?

Post by gwbas1c » Wed, Nov 06, 2019, 4:51 PM UTC

dkersten wrote: post #31

gwbas1c wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glib answer: Don't work alone! There's two ways to think about this: 1 - Your product might actually be too complex for a single-person business. You could rotate being on call for situations like this. This means that you'd have to make sure that sales are big enough to support an additional parter or two. 2 - Perhaps you need to simplify your product? Think more critically about error handling? I don't know the det…

My point was less about the specific issue I hit and more that 1) external circumstances that a restart won't resolve can cause failures, because 2) we're human and no matter how hard we try, even with a large team, things do slip through. The difference with having a large team is less that all possible failure cases will get protected against (although more eyes and code review does help), but more that someone can…

Post by scarface74 » Wed, Nov 06, 2019, 5:55 PM UTC

rasz wrote: post #62

scarface74 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I’ve spent close to 20 years hosting on IIS and have never had downtown attributable to it - especially since the app pool will recycle. Most of the issues I’ve seen were caused by people who didn’t know how to use EF correctly or badly tuned databases/queries. Even now, the only “Linux deployments” I do are either with Lambda or Fargate (Serverless Docker). I just don’t like managing servers. These days eve…

Code Red was 18 years ago, Blaster 16, Witty worm 15. All ate ISS servers for breakfast in highly automated fashion. 20 years of IIS with no downtown indeed.

Post by tbyehl » Wed, Nov 06, 2019, 6:13 PM UTC

jedieaston wrote: post #52

jasonkester wrote: post #36

I build my stuff on top of a stack that hardly ever goes down. All my SaaS products run on a Windows server, with SQL Server as a database and ASP.NET on IIS running the public sites. You can probably come up with a lot of uncharitable things to say about those technologies, but "flimsy" and "fragile" likely aren't in the list. As a result, when things go seriously wrong, the application pool will recycle itself and…

I’m curious, how much did you have to pay for your licenses? If you are a single founder with a new startup, it seems like you’d need a bunch of money to be able to use Microsoft in production, unless you can use something like BizSpark (if that’s still a thing?).

Post by jasonkester » Wed, Nov 06, 2019, 6:25 PM UTC

jedieaston wrote: post #52

jasonkester wrote: post #36

I build my stuff on top of a stack that hardly ever goes down. All my SaaS products run on a Windows server, with SQL Server as a database and ASP.NET on IIS running the public sites. You can probably come up with a lot of uncharitable things to say about those technologies, but "flimsy" and "fragile" likely aren't in the list. As a result, when things go seriously wrong, the application pool will recycle itself and…

I’m curious, how much did you have to pay for your licenses? If you are a single founder with a new startup, it seems like you’d need a bunch of money to be able to use Microsoft in production, unless you can use something like BizSpark (if that’s still a thing?).

Post by Scarbutt » Wed, Nov 06, 2019, 6:29 PM UTC

hellcow wrote: post #18

The only way to achieve high availability is to have redundancy of all things. Random things will go wrong that you can't predict. Boxes will die suddenly and without reason, even after months of working fine without changes, and always at the worst possible moment. Your system needs to be built to withstand that. I'll take the opposite approach of everyone here and recommend against serverless, kubernetes, and Herok…