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0 points_delirium14y ago0 comments

I suppose it depends on your use case, but I don't see those as necessarily worse failure modes than other options. For example, Reddit has in the past been down for >20 hours at a time with its cloud solution. With a local solution, you would want offsite backup for the catastrophic "building burned down" failure mode, but most local failures can be solved in that kind of timeframe with the "drive to Frys, buy new server, and restore from backup" recovery plan.

Now if you can't afford any downtime, a local server is probably not a good idea, but then neither are many of the cloud alternatives. Also depends on size, of course; one or two local servers is a more reasonable proposition than 35 servers randomly thrown under desks. (Though the "so uh, does anyone remember which room 'thor' is in?" moment used to be a classic startup rite of passage.)

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5 comments · 2 top-level

notatoad14y ago· 2 in thread

reddit goes down because they abuse(d) the shit out of AWS. judging cloud hosting by their failures is pointless. EBS is not meant to be a large scale memcached server.

i've done the "drive to fry's, buy a new server, restore from backup" type recovery. it sucks, you don't want to do it, but that's not what i'm talking about. if you're self-hosting at your office your run into all sorts of problems that datacenters solve. the cleaning staff at the DC will never unplug your server. you won't spill beer on it. if the internet goes down, they can fail-over to another connection, your office probably can't. the DC is closer to the backbone, giving your customers less latency. adequate cooling and smoother power means longer life for your hardware. and as you grow it's much easier to grow in a DC than having the server portion of your office gradually take up more and more space.

azylman14y ago

Just curious, how has reddit abused AWS?

SomeOtherGuy214y ago

They didn't. They just tried to store data on EBS volumes, you know, like they are supposed to. But EBS performance is very bad, and incredibly variable. So they would end up getting timeouts trying to write to the volumes, which broke their DB replication, which took the site offline for hours to re-replicate.

18pfsmt14y ago· 1 in thread

You've raised what I consider to be the elephant in the room, and you can see all the responses quick to tell you why can't do that> It simply doesn't fit with what most people consider acceptable, which is that one must be a user for everything internet related.

Most of us have at least ~5Mbps/ 2Mbps (up/down) connections at home that are always on with minimal latency. The gaming service OnLive shows that these connections are adequate for most people's needs. Home/ office connections will only get better, and I think the idea of running one's own server(s) for things like family and/ or small offices will make more sense than some 3rd party corporation's "cloud." PIM, email, IM, pictures, videos etc. simply don't need to be subject to the whims or TOS of a company or outside one's own control.

This is what I do currently, and it certainly is a kludge at the moment, but I believe it can be improved to the point of appliance-usage eventually.

falien14y ago

This is against many consumer ISP ToS and they can/will arbitrarily start blocking traffic on certain default ports depending on how draconian they are about it. I agree that hosting on a home server is an option (even a good one) for some people and usecases, but you are still subject to the whims of someone else, and in this case you often have no recourse as you are violating the ToS.

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