Ask HN: Do you feel vulnerable because your product is not physical?

[quizbiz]

Worst comes to worst, General Motors, now going into bankruptcy, can sell off its factories, its inventories, its infrastructure for billions.

But what do we as web developers, hackers, programers, have? How much is what we make worth without an internet connection? This gets me wondered how, if one wanted to, would go about insuring a website or web app. How would it be valued?

Am I the only one that feels vulnerable because of this? Is there a solution?

Hearing about Obama stepping up "efforts to secure the internet" (The Economist) got me thinking about this.

[SwellJoe]

It never crossed my mind to worry. But, then again, I've been in situations where my company (a previous one) wasn't making any money for a quite long period of time, and I had to improvise. It all turned out fine, in the sense that I never experienced foreclosure on the house, the power and phone and gas companies only threatened to turn them off, and the cash advance on the credit card covered the next couple of months worth of payments. I'm pretty easy going about that sort of thing, and I think it's served me well.

Just make sure you always have health insurance (this one isn't optional), and be prepared to tighten your belt a lot at the first signs of actual trouble.

It might help for you to make a plan for belt-tightening so you know how little you can actually live on. Things you could plan to do and factor into your new lean budget: Sell your car (assuming it isn't bringing in revenue due to doing contract work on-site or something), turn off the cable TV and mobile (again assuming you don't need a phone to make money), cancel all subscriptions to everything, eat cheaply (dry beans, rice, whatever vegetables are on special; about $1.50 per meal easy to achieve), and if you look at those numbers and are still worried, then your house or apartment is too big/expensive for you and you should downsize before trouble hits. You also want to make sure your credit cards are paid down while things are going OK.

And, of course, fearmongers are just that, and don't usually need to be taken too seriously. The Internet is pretty robust, in general, and important enough to the rest of the nations economy that even if things really went to hell, the biggest corporations in the world would spend billions or trillions to bring it back quickly. It's just too tightly integrated into everything now. You're not some outlier in building your business on the web...everybody is depending on the Internet. We're all in this together.