[intelVISA]

If you know what you're doing it's easy enough to roll out a multi-region distributed system with HA and backups on a pretty modest (<100pcm) budget that can handle competitive QPS.

However, most people do not - some will learn, but most will fall for the cloud marketing depts and become infra renters for life. Teach a man to fish, and so on.

[varispeed]

Another reason is that if you look for an investor, one of the first things they ask is how / where you host it. If it is anything remotely DIY you'll be turned down.

It was actually painful to see start ups spending thousands a month on hosting, that could be easily achieved as you say under 100 pcm plus. They would have to get a contractor to set it up and for support, but it would have worked out much cheaper and they could have bumped the salaries of their workers.

[monero-xmr]

Labor vs. commodity. Need an expert key-man to roll your own AWS. A few thousand bucks a month for the automatic one. Penny wise pound foolish etc.

[cyberpunk]

> If it is anything remotely DIY you'll be turned down.

Why is that?

[JohnBooty]

I'm sure you can guess - pure risk aversion. Your business idea is risky enough, and they would need engineers to assess your (possibly ever-changing) DIY stack.

You see the same thing in the corporate world for in-house stuff. Your manager (and your manager's manager) don't want to hear about in-house or self-hosted things that AWS can provide.

This is totally understandable. It's a repeat of the whole "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" mantra of computing's early decades.

It also totally sucks.

[Balladeer]

> some will learn, but most will fall for the cloud marketing depts and become infra renters for life

Do you have any learning recommendations for someone looking to start down this path? I've only ever worked in an infra-renter context, and I've begun exploring the 'rent from Hetzner, manage your own infra' for personal projects, but I would love to learn from the paths of experts where possible.

[intelVISA]

I'm no expert but hopefully I can still point you toward the happy path: start very small and increase distributed complexity at your own pace until you can fully appreciate the entire end-to-end system and all the processes involved. The book: DDIA is a well-known 101, if a little primitive, and has references you can dig into as well.

Ideally, you also have some exposure to this at $job as simply building DIY infra horrors without seeing the real-world context, tradeoffs, etc. in which they typically operate will be misleading.

[freefaler]

For your basic needs you'd need:

1. a DNS monitoring with failover (DNSMadeeasy has a decent solution)

2. a Haproxy setup with health checks for switching to a working upstream service

3. a distributed filesystem

4. a master-slave replication with monitoring (something like Mariadb + orchestrator service)

and nightly backups for all this. Database and FS are latency sensitive so they shouldn't be too far apart.

[arrowsmith]

I would also like to hear some recommendations as I've been considering making a similar switch.

[jiriro]

What is HA ?

[wlesieutre]

Guessing "high availability"

[marcosdumay]

It's a pretty common abbreviation of high availability on this context, with a heavy implication on active-passive redundancy (although the GP looks like an exception here). It's more used than the full wording, and part of the name of some important tools.

So, yeah, it's good that you asked, because it's not as widely known as the people that use it think it is.

[fragmede]

It stands for High Availability, so that one of the regions can completely fail, for whatever reason, and the site will still stay up.