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Tell HN: Server Status

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Re: Tell HN: Server Status

#21

Post by uccrost »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #17
cincinnatus wrote: post #6

I'm sure it has been asked many times before, but I'd love to hear the latest thinking... Why in 2013 is HN still running on bespoke hardware and software? If a startup came to you with this sort of legacy thinking you'd laugh them out of the room.

this sort of legacy thinking That's the kind of facile statement that makes people riotously mock the entire startup community, like "MongoDB is webscale" but even less valid. Cloud services are not a panacea, and there are myriad situations in which running one's own infrastructure can be a good idea. What matters is that the issues and benefits are taken into account; if one can show research demonstrating that a c…

it's definitintely not more reliable in this case...

Re: Tell HN: Server Status

#22

Post by acomjean »

cincinnatus wrote: post #6

I'm sure it has been asked many times before, but I'd love to hear the latest thinking... Why in 2013 is HN still running on bespoke hardware and software? If a startup came to you with this sort of legacy thinking you'd laugh them out of the room.

Periodic HN downtime helps software businesses be more productive.

Repeated Disk corruption maybe indicates a hardware problem unless the file system isn't up to snuff. Generally those file systems are pretty reliable.

Re: Tell HN: Server Status

#23

Post by pitchups »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #10
cincinnatus wrote: post #6

I'm sure it has been asked many times before, but I'd love to hear the latest thinking... Why in 2013 is HN still running on bespoke hardware and software? If a startup came to you with this sort of legacy thinking you'd laugh them out of the room.

HN isn't a mission-critical business. It's a fun, experimental distraction (albeit one that we all rate very highly, of course).

And also because that is the hallmark of a true hacker - roll your own - rather than rely on a ready made solution!

Re: Tell HN: Server Status

#24

Post by logicallee »

cincinnatus wrote: post #6

I'm sure it has been asked many times before, but I'd love to hear the latest thinking... Why in 2013 is HN still running on bespoke hardware and software? If a startup came to you with this sort of legacy thinking you'd laugh them out of the room.

if a startup came to YC with on the order of 10k uniques within minutes of posting a top link, and the kind of user accounts and engagement that HN has, they wouldn't care if it was written in Perl 2.0 running on a repurposed old 747's partial fly-by-wire computer. Really, Nobody Cares.

Dropbox was an rsync executed every two minutes.[1] AngelList was done via email.

[1] can't find this reference atm, could be apocryphal

Re: Tell HN: Server Status

#28

Post by eloff »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #17
cincinnatus wrote: post #6

I'm sure it has been asked many times before, but I'd love to hear the latest thinking... Why in 2013 is HN still running on bespoke hardware and software? If a startup came to you with this sort of legacy thinking you'd laugh them out of the room.

this sort of legacy thinking That's the kind of facile statement that makes people riotously mock the entire startup community, like "MongoDB is webscale" but even less valid. Cloud services are not a panacea, and there are myriad situations in which running one's own infrastructure can be a good idea. What matters is that the issues and benefits are taken into account; if one can show research demonstrating that a c…

The advantage of cloud servers is if one experiences corruption or goes down you just kill it and start a new one. If your cloudy EBS equivalent experiences corruption, you restore from snapshot and off you go again. Either way it involves less downtime than HN seems to have. The downside is it costs more (usually, depends on how high your server management and data center overheads are.) I'd like to point out that despite several high profile down time incidents in the aws, never was there a case that I'm aware of where you couldn't just restore from your last snapshot to another availability zone or region.

Re: Tell HN: Server Status

#29

Post by nullspace »

cincinnatus wrote: post #6

I'm sure it has been asked many times before, but I'd love to hear the latest thinking... Why in 2013 is HN still running on bespoke hardware and software? If a startup came to you with this sort of legacy thinking you'd laugh them out of the room.

If you can plan your hardware capacity, which is not that hard for a simple website like HN, it becomes far more cost effective to run on real hardware, even with a large overhead.

This is quite hard for startups to do, because their core function is to keep adding and removing features, experimenting and scaling, and the initial cost of buying hardware to support these functions is too large. This plus all the services provided by AWS et al. saves a lot of time and effort.

Nothing to do with "cloud" vs "non-cloud".

Re: Tell HN: Server Status

#30

Post by wlesieutre »

huhtenberg wrote: post #13
cincinnatus wrote: post #6

I'm sure it has been asked many times before, but I'd love to hear the latest thinking... Why in 2013 is HN still running on bespoke hardware and software? If a startup came to you with this sort of legacy thinking you'd laugh them out of the room.

Kids these days. Next thing you say you can't whistle at 2400 baud. Sheesh.

2400 Hz, if I'm not mistaken. Baud indicates how many signals you can send in a second. Hz is the wave frequency, which you have to mimic for the signaling tones.
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