The original site made by lukegb inspired me because of the down-to-earth simplicity. Scaling vertically is often so much easier and better in so many dimensions than creating a complex distributed computing setup.
This is why I recreated the site when it went down quite a while ago.
The recent article "Use One Big Server"[0] inspired me to (re)submit this website to HN because it addresses the same topic. I like this new article so much because in this day and age of the cloud, people tend to forget how insanely fast and powerful modern servers have become.
And if you don't have budget for new equiment, the second-hand stuff from a few years back is stil beyond amazing and the prices are very reasonable compared to cloud cost. Sure, running bare metal co-located somewhere has it's own cost, but it's not that of a big deal and many issues can be dealt with using 'remote hands' services.
To be fair, the article admits that in the end it's really about your organisation's specific circumstances and thus your requirements. Physical servers and/or vertical scaling may not (always) be the right answer. That said, do yourself a favour, and do take this option seriously and at least consider it. You can even do an experiment: buy some second-hand gear just to gain some experience with hardware if you don't have it already and do a trial in a co-location.
Now that we are talking, yourdatafitsinram.net runs on a Raspberry Pi 4 which in turn is running on solar power.[1]
(The blog and this site are both running on the same host)
The original site made by lukegb inspired me because of the down-to-earth simplicity. Scaling vertically is often so much easier and better in so many dimensions than creating a complex distributed computing setup.
This is why I recreated the site when it went down quite a while ago.
The recent article "Use One Big Server"[0] inspired me to (re)submit this website to HN because it addresses the same topic. I like this new article so much because in this day and age of the cloud, people tend to forget how insanely fast and powerful modern servers have become.
And if you don't have budget for new equiment, the second-hand stuff from a few years back is stil beyond amazing and the prices are very reasonable compared to cloud cost. Sure, running bare metal co-located somewhere has it's own cost, but it's not that of a big deal and many issues can be dealt with using 'remote hands' services.
To be fair, the article admits that in the end it's really about your organisation's specific circumstances and thus your requirements. Physical servers and/or vertical scaling may not (always) be the right answer. That said, do yourself a favour, and do take this option seriously and at least consider it. You can even do an experiment: buy some second-hand gear just to gain some experience with hardware if you don't have it already and do a trial in a co-location.
Now that we are talking, yourdatafitsinram.net runs on a Raspberry Pi 4 which in turn is running on solar power.[1] (The blog and this site are both running on the same host)
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32319147
[1]: https://louwrentius.com/this-blog-is-now-running-on-solar-po...