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Use One Big Server (2022)

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343 points antov825 | 1 comments | 31 Aug 25 17:29 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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talles ◴[31 Aug 25 18:06 UTC] No.45085392[source]▶
Don't forget the cost of managing your one big server and the risk of having such single point of failure.
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Puts ◴[31 Aug 25 18:20 UTC] No.45085534[source]▶
My experience after 20 years in the hosting industry is that customers in general have more downtime due to self-inflicted over-engineered replication, or split brain errors than actual hardware failures. One server is the simplest and most reliable setup, and if you have backup and automated provisioning you can just re-deploy your entire environment in less than the time it takes to debug a complex multi-server setup.

I'm not saying everybody should do this. There are of-course a lot of services that can't afford even a minute of downtime. But there is also a lot of companies that would benefit from a simpler setup.

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1. api ◴[01 Sep 25 01:07 UTC] No.45088512[source]▶
A lot of this attitude comes from the bad old days of 90s and early 2000s spinning disk. Those things failed a lot. It made everyone think you are going to have constant outages if you don’t cluster everything.

Today’s systems don’t fail nearly as often if you use high quality stuff and don’t beat the absolute hell out of SSD. Another trick is to overprovision SSD to allow wear leveling to work better and reduce overall write load.

Do that and a typical box will run years and years with no issues.