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One server is enough for many small businesses. And for large business (like X or Instagram) it is economically more profitable to own their servers. For exampl

One server is enough for many small businesses. And for large business (like X or Instagram) it is economically more profitable to own their servers. For example, in my country top companies like VK or Yandex own their datacenters and sell cloud services instead of paying for someone's else cloud. Also if you have several servers you do not need to hire a full-time sysadmin. > Managing a non-trivial hardware fleet requires people, and people cost money. People in AWS also cost money and guess who is going to cover this cost?

cyberax 2mo ago
Suppose that you are a midsize company or a b2b service, so you want to make sure that your service has minimum downtime. This means that you need sysadmins in close proximity to your hardware to do hardware swapping/troubleshooting. Or you need to engineer your system to not have a SPOF (which is not easy). So you're looking at employing at least 2 engineers near your datacenter.
- calvinmorrison 2mo ago
  Really? We basically never go onsight. Ticket in with the colo and they can help.
  - cyberax 2mo ago
    That really works well while you have a rack or so. Afterwards, you really need people who know all the details of networking and storage. Especially if you're designing something without a SPOF. What's changing is the scope of things that you can run on that one rack. 15 years ago, I was running clusters of 30 computers to do things that I now can do with 1.
    - calvinmorrison 2mo ago
      Nope... last time i was on site was when we migrated data centers. a dozen racks.
marysol5 2mo ago
>own their datacenters and sell cloud services instead of paying for someone's else cloud. Or because it's cost-effective to slice up your infrastructure and sell off the bits you're not using right now.
nijave 2mo ago
No it's not. The poster is advocating replacing technology to share a single system with dedicated, non-shared systems. Even the most basic business app has an app server and a database server. If they have 6 business apps, they'd have at least 7 dedicated servers (assuming we're allowing a database server to have multiple app databases sharing it)

cyberax 2mo ago

Suppose that you are a midsize company or a b2b service, so you want to make sure that your service has minimum downtime. This means that you need sysadmins in close proximity to your hardware to do hardware swapping/troubleshooting. Or you need to engineer your system to not have a SPOF (which is not easy). So you're looking at employing at least 2 engineers near your datacenter.

calvinmorrison 2mo ago
Really? We basically never go onsight. Ticket in with the colo and they can help.
- cyberax 2mo ago
  That really works well while you have a rack or so. Afterwards, you really need people who know all the details of networking and storage. Especially if you're designing something without a SPOF. What's changing is the scope of things that you can run on that one rack. 15 years ago, I was running clusters of 30 computers to do things that I now can do with 1.
  - calvinmorrison 2mo ago
    Nope... last time i was on site was when we migrated data centers. a dozen racks.

marysol5 2mo ago

>own their datacenters and sell cloud services instead of paying for someone's else cloud. Or because it's cost-effective to slice up your infrastructure and sell off the bits you're not using right now.

nijave 2mo ago

No it's not. The poster is advocating replacing technology to share a single system with dedicated, non-shared systems. Even the most basic business app has an app server and a database server. If they have 6 business apps, they'd have at least 7 dedicated servers (assuming we're allowing a database server to have multiple app databases sharing it)