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by kelnos 891 days ago
Hi Zac, thank you for chiming in here. Been using Kagi since the private beta, and have been overwhelmingly impressed by the service since I first used it.

Don't worry too much about all the people being harsh in the comments here. There's always a tendency for HN users to pile on with criticism whenever anyone has an outage.

I've always found this bizarre, because I've worked at places with worse issues, and more holes in monitoring or whatever than a lot of the companies that get skewered here. Perhaps many of us are just insecure about our own infra and project our feeling onto other companies when they have outages.

Y'all are doing fine, and I think it's to your credit that you're able to run Kagi's users table off a single, fairly cheap primary database instance. I've worked at places that haven't much thought to optimization, and "solve" scaling problems by throwing more and bigger hardware at it, and then wonder later on why they're bleeding cash on infrastructure. Of course, by that point, those inefficiencies are much more difficult to fix.

As for monitoring, unfortunately sometimes you don't know everything you need to monitor until something bad happens because your monitoring was missing something critical that you didn't realize was critical. That's fine; seems like y'all are aware and are plugging those holes. I'm sure there will be more of those holes in the future, that's just life.

At any rate, keep doing what you're doing, and I know the next time you get hit with something bad, things will be a bit better.

3 comments

Very kind, thank you! (and everyone else too, many heartwarming replies)
Agreed. Even though this site is on YC’s domain, I think only a few of the folks in the comments are actually early-adopting startup types. Probably just due to power law statistics, I’d guess most commenters are big company worker bees who’ve never worked on/at a seed stage startup.

If everything at Kagi was FAANG-level bulletproof, with extensive processes around outages/redundancy, then the team absolutely would not be making the best use of their time/resources.

If you’re risk averse and aren’t comfortable encountering bugs/issues like this, don’t try any new software product of moderate complexity for about 7-10 years.

> people being harsh in the comments here

I've read most of the comments here, and don't recall anything negative, just supportive.