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My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

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Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#61

Post by voidlogic »

The author doesn't explain why his stack is better than Java/Scala/Go/C#(Mono) + MySQL/Postgresql + Linux/BSD.

You don't have to use Ruby/Python/PHP/Perl/node.js to have an open stack. What happens in 3 years when his bizpark runs out? What happens if he is successful before then and is running many servers and DB instances.... What if he need to re-arch to support HA?

Its almost like his argument is.. meh.. in the short term running a Microsoft stack wasn't overtly harmful, since its what I am used to I discarded other considerations...

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#62

Post by lifeisstillgood »

If you are defining your startup based on the operating system of the servers, you are really really looking the wrong way.

As you name-checked Amy Hoy in the first paragraph, I assume you follow the 30x500 list, or at least know of it, which is pretty basic common sense - and all of it focused on users not servers.

Now - stop flame-baiting HN and get out of the office

;-)

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#63

Post by viraptor »

Spooky23 wrote: post #4

How much of this is old-school admin practices vs. the new "cloud" philosophy of spinning up lots of boxes that you don't care about? I don't see a Microsoft vs. Open-source argument for alot of this stuff. Many of the devs I see working with "cool kids" tools don't know anything about operating IT environments, yet they are playing admin. They're spinning up dozens of single-purpose VMs, sometimes to perform trivial…

It's not just a cool cloud thing. Managing multiple services on a single host comes at its own price too. Trying to manage security separation, disk space, specific user access, projecting bandwidth / cpu / memory / disk usage in the future, figuring out which services cannot run on the same host for yet another set of reasons. Then you add HA for only one service and end up with host A with services X,Y,Z and host B with X,P,Q.

There's a lot of great things about being able to say - these are the two DNS boxes. They pretty much serve static data and have minimal traffic - stick them on two minimal instances which cost us ~0, but give a very high isolation from other failures.

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#65

Post by merlincorey »

giulianob wrote: post #6
petercooper wrote: post #2

The guy behind PlentyOfFish (the dating site) has written similar things in the past. Various links and tech info: http://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architecture It seems a lot of MS stuff, used properly, scale well and easily , making it particularly suitable for single founders or small teams where they don't want to devote a lot of time to ops (while still keeping it in-house). Becoming a member of their "Bi…

I got into it with my game company but once you graduate, then you need to start paying up. Maybe it only cost him a couple hundred bucks a month now but once he needs to pay for the licenses then that's when he can judge if it's really worth it. Until then, he's just getting stuff for free and saying how great it is.

What if... the linked blog post is worth 1 extra year of free licenses and was commissioned by Microsoft PR.

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#66

Post by joshuaellinger »

BizSpark is a better deal than most people realize.

You get permanent licenses and a decent amount of cloud hours. You get office. You get dev tools.

When the program finished, if you are not making enough money to afford to pay them, then you should just shut down and do something else. But even if you keep going, you can probably live on old versions for 3-5 years before it gets too painful.

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#67

Post by apalmer »

jasonkester wrote: post #34
mjn wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also a cap of 3 years, even if you haven't hit $1m revenue yet: http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/faqs.aspx#16

Fortunately, they reinvent the program every few years. So in reality you can be in EmpowerISV for 3 years, then BizSpark for 3 years, then [thing that replaces bizspark in 2/2014] for 3 years, etc. I've personally been in Microsoft's "let's give developers everything for basically free" programs since 2006, and am not worried that I'll suddenly face a crippling bill down the line. Shafting little startups for a lous…

This is true, but you absolutely cannot build your business on 'Something will show up to keep us going in 3 years'.

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#68

Post by eddieroger »

This was the most relevant bit, far as I can tell:

>> Because I love C#

Fair enough. If I liked C#, I'd live in a Microsoft world, too. I don't, though, and without this being a language war, the ones I like are easy enough to set up on Linux, and tend to be a heck of a lot more stable and easy to install, too.

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#69

Post by jasonkester »

viraptor wrote: post #54
jasonkester wrote: post #19

I'll pluralize this anecdote. Every bit of my little software empire runs on a single Windows box. That includes my 3 main money-making products, a couple dozen smaller sites being hosted for consulting clients and my partner's businesses, and the Expat blog. Lots of steady-state traffic to lots of sites, several Techcrunch, Reddit and HN poundings, nothing to write home about as far as downtime or drama in the 6 yea…

Just out of interest - what's your plan for when that host dies? (complete disk corruption) How quickly can you recover to the exact same state? (I don't mean getting the data back, I mean actually having your software empire back online, serving live traffic again with minimal data loss)

Restore from yesterdays backup onto the machine below it in the cage. Then buy a new machine to replace it.

That 2nd machine is already running all the same sites (as a QA/Staging server), so it's pretty much good to go already.

Sorry if I wasn't clear that "running everything from a single server" doesn't equal "only owning a single computer".

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#70

Post by venomsnake »

growt wrote: post #13

I don't want to bash microsoft or anything. But 2.5 daily visitors and 1.5k new tickets daily can probably be served by nginx, a raspberry pi and a potato.

They give 1.6 volts each. So you will need 3 of them for the power source and you may have a problem with amperage.

But yeah - people seem to gravely underestimate the power of the current hardware and how much of it is wasted currently.

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