[willvarfar]

http://blog.foursquare.com/2010/10/05/so-that-was-a-bummer/

You had 11 hours downtime and didn't lose money?

What about opportunity cost? Reputation?

Now you have to share your secret :)

(I guess, if you weren't profitable, you had nothing to lose?)

[harryh]

The 11 hours of downtime was a pretty big deal, but it had very little to do with MongoDB. It was basically a huge failure in proper monitoring.

[9oliYQjP]

Kudos for not blaming the tool when that would have been the easiest route. It's worth mentioning that 10gen has MongoDB Monitoring Service out now. It makes monitoring MongoDB instances a lot more accessible and convenient.

[willvarfar]

That's not how everyone remembered it at the time, nor the picture the blog painted. And the mongo monitoring thing is much newer, right? Its like saying that a fire wasn't a big deal because next time there'll be a fire station.

Stockholm syndrome?

Or perhaps investor pressure to close ranks ;)

[jm3]

If you don't have paying customers (Foursquare), you're not going to lose much in hard dollars when your service falls over. Reputation points? Sure. Dollars, not so much.

[maxmcd]

Drawing a line between the difference in losing money for a paying service and a free service, while technically correct, is not the best business practice. Any online business looses money by being down, whether they can easily quantify it or not.