If I was your cloud provider, I'd never let you down • Hacker News Board

Re: If I was your cloud provider, I'd never let you down

#121

Post by rgbrgb » Tue, Oct 23, 2012, 3:37 PM UTC

xanados wrote: post #120

Cyranix wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively, instead of an oversimplified bet, how about they draw up an SLA like normal companies would? Congrats on the 100%, but how long have you been running? And have you been serving any heavyweight clients or fended off persistent attacks?

Since this is a marketing piece, they should have to put some real money where their mouth is. Typical SLAs don't come close to being punitive for downtime. They might offer to refund the hosting fee for time down in excess of the benchmark, which would not be interesting marketing and does not indicate that they have especially high confidence in their service exceeding its uptime (relative to competitors).

It would be great if they offered reddit a 1 year deal with guaranteed %99.9999 uptime or their money back. But then, I suppose hackers of the world just wouldn't stand down to that challenge.

Re: If I was your cloud provider, I'd never let you down

#122

Post by jamie » Tue, Oct 23, 2012, 4:01 PM UTC

typicalrunt wrote: post #110

UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"lifetime" "unlimited" "forever" etc products should always been looked at sceptically for that reason. Anything that is either finite or requires up-keep cannot be offered on these terms, it is just impossible. I actually avoid unlimited products on purpose because I think a lie is a bad way to start doing business together. Be it web-hosting, broadband, or anything else. I would prefer they just be up front and the…

What Joyent forgot about was that by getting rid of the lifetime account holders (I was one) they were effectively silencing their greatest word of mouth sales. I would always recommend their services to others, and I would purchase many of their other products/services as they came out. But by pulling out the rug under me[1], it left me distrustful of them. So let's assume that I got my money's worth, but what Joyen…

Same here - I'll never recommend them, and have actively discouraged people from using or investigating them.

They may be great technically, but I always mention their spotty/inconsistent and poor treatment of me as a customer. Even if I'm not the most lucrative customer, how you treat every customer is important. You never know who, dispute being a low-revenue personal user, is a high-revenue business user.

Re: If I was your cloud provider, I'd never let you down

#123

Post by pbhjpbhj » Tue, Oct 23, 2012, 4:03 PM UTC

staunch wrote: post #21

My new startup, Uptano ( https://uptano.com ), is a cloud provider (still hurts me to write "cloud"). ..and we've had 100% uptime in our short run so far. Our systems are highly redundant and as decoupled as possible. Still, I wouldn't for one second claim that I, or anyone else, could do better than AWS on reliability. AWS does a great job on reliability. I do think EBS is a terrible technology that should die in a…

>Still, I wouldn't for one second claim that I, or anyone else, could do better than AWS on reliability. //

That may be true over all customers but for reddit I'm estimating about 1 day of downtime for me in a year (that might even be conservative?) - so that's 99.7% approx.

Joyent are claiming that their customers [who?] have only about 30s of downtime per annum.

Reliability obviously extends beyond downtime but still AWS don't seem to be do incredibly well for reddit.

Re: If I was your cloud provider, I'd never let you down

#124

Post by sapien » Tue, Oct 23, 2012, 4:09 PM UTC

wisty wrote: post #16

With a one-line pitch like "HIGH-PERFORMANCE CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE FOR REAL-TIME WEB AND MOBILE APPLICATIONS", what could possibly go wrong? No, I don't hate Joyent. I can't even figure out what they offer. And I don't see "Python" or "Postgres" or "Redis" in their tech stack page, so what would reddit (a Python / Postres / Redis site) want with them? They seem to be mostly node.js / Mongo, which is a nice tech stack…

Minor nitpick but: s/Redis/Cassandra/

Re: If I was your cloud provider, I'd never let you down

#125

Post by petercooper » Tue, Oct 23, 2012, 4:10 PM UTC

randomchars wrote: post #94

lostsock wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and still down 3 hours later... ouch!

Disable https everywhere.

Connect with Gopher, their Gopher server is still open. I found it over WAIS.

Re: If I was your cloud provider, I'd never let you down

#126

Post by alanh » Tue, Oct 23, 2012, 4:11 PM UTC

It should be “if I were your cloud provider.” It’s a possibility and a wish of theirs, so it should be expressed in the subjunctive. http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/subjunctive-verbs-was-i...

Re: If I was your cloud provider, I'd never let you down

#127

Post by tedunangst » Tue, Oct 23, 2012, 4:11 PM UTC

dalore wrote: post #100

irahul wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "lifetime" "unlimited" "forever" etc products should always been looked at sceptically for that reason. Anything that is either finite or requires up-keep cannot be offered on these terms, it is just impossible. When a company is offering "lifetime", "unlimited", "forever" et al, the most likely reason is it is cash strapped and is hoping to raise some cash with these lucrative schemes. I, as a customer, am well aw…

Reminds me of the lifetime free flights that were offered in the past: http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2012/05/lifetime-air...

They still honor those passes, except in the case of people clearly abusing them.

Re: If I was your cloud provider, I'd never let you down

#128

Post by tedunangst » Tue, Oct 23, 2012, 4:12 PM UTC

praptak wrote: post #15

bslatkin wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. You are responsible for replication, failover, disaster recovery, etc.

The point of using IaaS is to outsource as least some of the responsibilities.

No, you outsource the work, not the responsibility.

Re: If I was your cloud provider, I'd never let you down

#129

Post by anonymouz » Tue, Oct 23, 2012, 4:21 PM UTC

drivingmenuts wrote: post #102

anonymouz wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I understand one would have to sue in small claims court in California to get anything out of it. Since I'm in Europe, it unfortunately is not a cost-effective option. (I think I paid ~500$ for the original plan, so it's cheaper to write it off)

> so it's cheaper to write it off That's what they're counting on.

Probably. Unfortunately it's still true: I'm not going to spend thousands of dollars and lots of my time to sue them in California.

Re: If I was your cloud provider, I'd never let you down

#130

Post by switch007 » Tue, Oct 23, 2012, 4:30 PM UTC

davidw wrote: post #14

If I were a grammar nazi, I'd be quite irate.

WordReference usually has good discussions on such topics. E.g. http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=50929

Having studied Spanish, "if I was" sounds very strange now. In Spanish it'd always be the subjunctive: e.g. "si fuera..." and never the indicative "si fui...".