Tell HN: Server Status • Hacker News Board

Re: Tell HN: Server Status

#91

Post by eloff » Thu, Jan 16, 2014, 4:21 PM UTC

KaiserPro wrote: post #89

eloff wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

And how do you guarantee the validity of your snap shot? has your process been writing corrupt records for the last n hours and not notice? Do you even have access to that snapshot if the system is down? the cloud simply exchanges know levels of failure with unknown level of failure. You pay someone else to think about it for you. If there is a massive data loss at amazon, and people have been backing up to glacier,…

The same with any other incremental backup. You have a backup retention policy and go back to the last good one. Being in the cloud doesn't change that.

Re: Tell HN: Server Status

#92

Post by Goladus » Thu, Jan 16, 2014, 4:36 PM UTC

I've been reading this site regularly for almost 7 years. 6-Jan-2014 is the only downtime I remember, and it was really a very minor inconvenience. Sucks about the data loss though, always hard to own that when doing system administration. Thanks for the explanation.

Re: Tell HN: Server Status

#93

Post by rrpadhy » Thu, Jan 16, 2014, 4:40 PM UTC

I am curious to know the server configuration, architecture and the number of hits it is getting.

If someone does offer a new software architecture, and hosting, would people be open to move hackernews there?

Re: Tell HN: Server Status

#94

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 16, 2014, 5:00 PM UTC

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.

[deleted]

Re: Tell HN: Server Status

#95

Post by johne20 » Thu, Jan 16, 2014, 5:02 PM UTC

makmanalp wrote: post #55

The trend I'm noticing is people mentioning that if only HN was moved to , problems would go away. Instead of doing that, they probably dropped a bit more than a thousand dollars on a box, and are probably saving thousands in costs per year. This is money coming out of someone's pocket. This site is here, and it's a charity, being provided free of cost, to you. Who cares if HN is down for a few hours? Seriously? Has…

These type of threads always end up being "cloud vs dedicated" when in my opinion it should be about the architecture. It shouldn't matter if you are running dedicated vs cloud assuming a fairly reliable provider. It should be about avoiding single points of failure and redundancy.

eg. If there is a hardware failure, can the site still remain operational? Of course resources cost money, but you could have 2 cheaper/smaller servers load balanced for around the price of 1 pricier/bigger server.

Re: Tell HN: Server Status

#96

Post by colinbartlett » Thu, Jan 16, 2014, 5:05 PM UTC

annnnd wrote: post #72

loceng wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to discount the value of HackerNews, however there is great benefit to YCombinator being associated with it; They could let it go down and never host it again but they would lose value.

Yes, but I don't think such shortages do them much harm.

Sadly, I agree. But only because there's not a viable alternative. It's like if YouTube goes down for an hour, everyone whines but really nothing changes.

Re: Tell HN: Server Status

#97

Post by joeblau » Thu, Jan 16, 2014, 5:29 PM UTC

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…

HN is about hosting a forum for intelligent people to communicate various intellectual topics, not about being a dev/ops challenge. There is no good reason that they can't run this on some services/hardware that are more stable than what they've got. People behind the YC community (VCs investing in the HN companies and many of the successful founders) are millionaires+ so the "price" argument really dons't make sense. YC should be setting the example of how to do it right.

Re: Tell HN: Server Status

#98

Post by Harj » Thu, Jan 16, 2014, 5:30 PM UTC

catinsocks wrote: post #68

makmanalp wrote: post #55

The trend I'm noticing is people mentioning that if only HN was moved to , problems would go away. Instead of doing that, they probably dropped a bit more than a thousand dollars on a box, and are probably saving thousands in costs per year. This is money coming out of someone's pocket. This site is here, and it's a charity, being provided free of cost, to you. Who cares if HN is down for a few hours? Seriously? Has…

HN is not a charity, it is a marketing platform for YC with some community aspects. There is a very strong bias to everything YC. The HN community has also outgrown the software HN was built on you can see this in threads like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7051091 but even that thread is an extreme many front page items that gain traction are hard to go through because of things like lack of foldable comments…

HN is not a charity, it is a marketing platform for YC with some community aspects.

Feels more like a community with some YC marketing aspects to me.

Re: Tell HN: Server Status

#99

Post by rdl » Thu, Jan 16, 2014, 5:48 PM UTC

ishener wrote: post #7

may i ask where are the machines hosted? is that on AWS? if not, why don't you move to a more reliable hosting, like AWS?

softlayer. which is generally much more robust (physical hw) vs. AWS.

Re: Tell HN: Server Status

#100

Post by superice » Thu, Jan 16, 2014, 5:52 PM UTC

Good you posted this, but it came a little late. After the first series of timeouts you could've posted an update so everybody knew what was going on. But hey, thanks for the update, this clears up a lot.