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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. Aeolun ◴[01 Sep 25 11:02 UTC] No.45091645[source]▶
In my experience, my personal services have gone down exactly zero times. Actually not entirely true, but every time they stopped working the servers had simply run out of disk space.

The number of production incidents on our corporate mishmash of lambda, ecs, rds, fargate, ec2, eks etc? It’s a good week when something doesn’t go wrong. Somehow the logging setup is better on the personal stuff too.