Comment by lionkor

2 months ago

Cloudflare is now below 99.9% uptime, for anyone keeping track. I reckon my home PC is at least 99.9%.

Indeed. AWS too.

I feel like the cloud hosting companies have lost the plot. "They can provide better uptime than us" is the entire rationale that a lot of small companies have when choosing to run everything in the cloud.

If they cost more AND they're less reliable, what exactly is the reason to not self host?

  • > If they cost more AND they're less reliable, what exactly is the reason to not self host?

    Shifting liability. You're paying someone else for it to be their problem, and if everyone does it, no one will take flak for continuing to do so. What is the average tenure of a CIO or decision maker electing to move to or remain at a cloud provider? This is why you get picked to talk on stage at cloud provider conferences.

    (have been in the meetings where these decisions are made)

  • Plus, when you self-host, you can likely fix the issue yourself in a couple of hours max, instead of waiting indefinitely for a fix or support that might never come.

    • These global cloud outages aren’t the real issue; they affect everyone and get fixed.

      What is killer is when there is a KNOWN issue that affects YOU but basically only you so why bother fixing it!

      11 replies →

  • Capex vs Opex and scale-out.

    For a start-up it's much easier to just pay the Cloud tax than it is to hire people with the appropriate skill sets to manage hardware or to front the cost.

    Larger companies on the other hand? Yeah, I don't see the reason to not self host.

TBF, it depends on the number of outages locally. In my area it is one outage every thunderstorm/snow storm, so unfortunately the up time of my laptop, even with the help of a large, portable battery charging station (which can charge multiple laptops at the same time), is not optimistic.

I sometimes fancy that I could just take cash, go into the wood, build a small solar array, collect & cleanse river water, and buy a starlink console.

  • Yeah, I'd guess I average a power drop once a month or so at home. Never calculated the nines of uptime average, but it's not that infrequent.

    I know when I need to reset the clock on my microwave oven.

When a piece of hardware goes or a careless backup process fails, downtime of a self-hosted service can be measured in days or weeks.

Where/how are you keeping track of this? What is their current uptime percentage?

  • 1 - downtime/period. I suspect period is 1 year. 99.9% is 8.76 hours of downtime a year.

    • Exactly this. Just keep a note every time they have a big outage, and then take the last year and see if its over 9 hours, is a good measure.