| I love how there's this myth that servers and services just blow up every 10 minutes 24/7 and unless you have a legion of ops personnel you're going to get hours of downtime each year. Servers, for the most part, just work. In DC climate-controlled environments, hardware failures is exceedingly rare. Apart from harddrives, most hardware will happily tick along for a decade, if not longer. Sane production-grade OSes (read: not Ubuntu) will also happily run for literal years with zero human intervention. For obvious reasons, it's a bad idea to not patch your systems, but things will continue to "just work" pretty much forever unless you're running really shitty code. For renting vs buying servers, there's upsides and downsides. Buying gear is far far cheaper if you plan to be around for more than a year, but renting dedicated servers gives you a lot more flexibility -- to provision a new server, you hit a button in their online panel, wait 15 minutes, then let your deployment strategy take care of the rest. I find it almost mind-boggling that AWS and friends have convinced people that it's normal to spend ridiculous amounts of money for fairly "meh" service specs in what's essentially VMs. |