
[OP] the decay of reliable infrastructure - dijit
https://blog.dijit.sh/op-the-decay-of-reliable-infrastructure
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PaulHoule
I have such fond memories of the dedicated server days, when I'd contact
customer support to add a hard drive, then contact them again to upgrade the
ethernet port speed, then somehow they would increase my port speed without
charging me for it, then after that I'd get a 500 error whenever I'd try to
create a ticket, then after I reboot the machine I find the partition table
got nuked. Then I'd talk to three levels of customer service people before
finding the senior guy who looks at the ticket system in the SQL monitor and
says "that's interesting."

Then I move to AWS and I get a call from a crack salesperson who says that
"people who leave us for AWS always come back" and you know... I haven't gone
back.

And that was a reputable hosting company. Back around 2001 I was working with
an entrepreneural minded MBA and he would find incredible deal for dedicated
servers from companies that would suddenly go out of business or have their
suppliers go out of business -- we got fast at restoring from off-site backups
so it was ok...

If you need reliabilty, use a virtual machine on an IBM 390.

~~~
dijit
I'm sorry you have that experience.

Typically I'm talking on a relatively big scale and I should have mentioned
that in that poor excuse of a blog post.

We're a pretty big company, we have our own datacenters our own hardware. And
usually when you work with a half-decent server provider you talk directly
with a person who has physical access to the machine and the ability to change
things like that.

Still- that doesn't discount your experience and if you're at
VPS/Startup/Small infra level then cloud is a fine solution to be sure.

My experience of the cloud (amazons in particular) is that instances just "go
away" for 8 hours and you cannot contact support, the little service alert
says the availaibilty zone is green but you have a little dialog saying "you
may experience some issues with your instance".

Which happened to be 8 times in one month.. And I'm sure that no client is big
enough for amazon to start giving a solidary fuck about customer service in
that regard.

