
Priority One: Keep Your Site Up - messel
http://www.victusspiritus.com/2009/11/21/priority-one-keep-your-site-up/
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uggedal
To make sure it's up, use a web monitoring service like: <http://pingdom.com/>
<http://sitecanary.com/> <http://dingitsup.com/> <http://neighborhoodwat.ch/>
<http://uptimeparty.com/> <http://aremysitesup.com/> or <http://wasitup.com>
(my own creation).

~~~
messel
Hey thanks for the list, any particular preference for one service over
another to make sure it's up?

Any idea why this was downvoted?

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jsatok
I personally really like Pingdom. It's simple to setup and pretty cheap.

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stingraycharles
Which means: don't do it yourself, unless you're an expert, which you are most
likely not. Suck it up, it costs more money, but when you're just starting out
and can't hire people dedicated to managing your servers, you should just pay
another company to do it, otherwise you're just being penny wise. Downtime
costs a lot more.

~~~
bumblebird
There's a balance. Also one of the traits startups need IMHO is the ability to
'become an expert quickly' if you need to, and if it makes sense time wise.

VPSs are great, but I've never got the point of things like engineyard where
you're paying masses to get people to do sysadmin.

There's so many reasons a site can be down, you can't just move all
responsibility to another company - at least I don't think that's a good idea
at all. By all means move hardware to them, net connection to them. You don't
want to worry about power outages, etc

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_pius
_VPSs are great, but I've never got the point of things like engineyard where
you're paying masses to get people to do sysadmin._

Keeping a competent sysadmin around who will reliably respond 24/7 is much
more expensive than managed hosting, in general.

~~~
bumblebird
But that 'competent sysadmin' is usually a founder. Surely. And founders never
sleep...

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stingraycharles
And that's where you make a mistake: sure, the founder can be a competent
sysadmin, but the founder simply cannot replace a team of sysadmins. You need
to be available 24/7 -- there's always that pressure on your social live that
you need to remain available, etc etc etc.

You think you can do it, as a founder, especially when you've got some
sysadmin skills, but you simply cannot do as good a job as a team of
operations people who are stand-by 24/7. And you simply cannot afford such a
team for yourself when you're starting out.

~~~
bumblebird
>> "You need to be available 24/7"

And that's where you make the mistake. Look at twitter. Look at facebook. Look
at anything else. They're all broken from time to time, all offline every so
often. People are pretty forgiving especially at the start.

~~~
_pius
I'm reminded of a talk Chris Wanstrath gave where he said:

 _"Would you pay $100 an hour for an untrained accountant? Because if your
consulting rate is $100 an hour and you do your own accounting, that's exactly
what's happening."_ <https://gist.github.com/0a2655aed6a26fa15a02>

So I guess the relevant questions are:

1\. How much is your time worth?

2\. How much are you willing to pay for an untrained sysadmin?

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TheKid
Tip: Don't write a post about keeping a service up when the service is still
down.

<http://victusmedia.com/> \- Blank box on right?

~~~
messel
Heh! Why do you think it's been haunting me ;)

I'm logged in as root now trying to make sense of what's choking it.

I just nuked about 100 http processes that were just sitting there. We'll have
it up this afternoon I suspect (the guy that set this up is much more familiar
with the framework than I).

Here's a look <http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1127092/BuggyProcess.jpg>. Go go
dropbox public links to images.

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koblas
I guess the question is why are people still building/managing their own
servers for startups? EC2 and Rackspace cloud is cost wise equal, with the
ability to have cold standbys and somebody else manage the infrastructure.

The only case that I see for having your own machines is for a development
environment... Though if there was a reputable firm hosting SVN/Trac/Bugzilla
etc. one might not even need to have anything more than boxes for compiles --
in this world it's your macbook..

~~~
mmt
_somebody else manage the infrastructure_

I submit that this is an overly simplistic view of what "the infrastructure"
is, a view common among those who write software: the infrastructre is
anything that isn't the code they write.

There are very few scenarios where a non-trivial site can be kept up (that is,
not "dysfunctional or down" as the OP mentions early on) with merely
application code and generic, undifferentiated, off-the-rack infrastructure.

To scale even modestly, one must customize. The customization can start with
the web framework and can eventually lead to hardware components (though the
"lowest" I know of is Google's custom mobos). There are also operational
considerations, such as

I think there are two separate questions for any enterprise. The first is, is
further customization an optimization. The second is, is the optimization
premature?

To suggest that, for all startups, the answer to the first is always "no"
and/or the answer to the second is always "yes" would be overly broad.

~~~
messel
Thanks mmt.

For the folks that have created many web apps many of these questions have
default answers based on experience but for a first timer like me I can't
afford to learn by failing at every fork. I need to minimize my failed choices
by searching for external input from people that have been through it before.

