[Supreme]

No redundancy what-so-ever? What an amateur operation. I still say Joel is a fraud.

EDIT: this site is amazing - divergent opinions seem to be actively discouraged given how many "points" I've lost thanks to stating mine. Is the point of this site for all of the members to think in the same way?

[tinco]

Ofcourse they have redundancy, just not cross-datacenter redundancy. And if you knew anything about cross-datacenter redundancy you'd know that cross-datacenter redundancy is something you do not decide upon lightly.

Then again, having cross-datacenter backups that can easily be taken online would be a bit more professional than 'we want to physically move the servers'.

[pc86]

I'll be the first to admit I don't really know anything about cross-datacenter redundancy; however, I always thought that was pretty high on the list once you had SaaS products that were pulling in enough revenue to warrant full-time employees outside of the founders. What are the reasons why you would choose not to do it? Are they all financial or are there other implications?

[Supreme]

Are you kidding me? If you run big sites like FogBugz then ofcourse you have cross-datacenter redundancy. It's not complicated to host your staging site in another physical location and point the DNS records to it when things go pear-shaped.

[burningion]

There's a huge difference between code you've written in your spare time, and code that exists in production.

Code that exists in production is often buggy and unwieldy, and doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense. Because when you have a product that makes money, your priorities also change.

You need to become more defensive about your maneuvers, and you have to have a real reason to justify changing code.

To commit to doing redundancy well, you need a lot of resources, and you need to have a justify diverting resources that could otherwise be used to build a better product.

There's a common misconception that you can just throw stuff at the cloud (AWS, Heroku, etc), and things will just stay up. In practice, between cacheing, database server backups, heavy writes, and crazy growth, there's a lot to deal with. It's not nearly a solved or a simple problem.

So people are probably down voting you because your opinion seems naive to them. I've personally migrated a top 80,000 global eCommerce operation, and everything broke in a million different places, and we spent 2 weeks afterwards getting things working properly again.

There's a big difference between the way things are in your head, and the way things are in the production. Don't say people don't know what they're doing because they don't have a perfect system. No system is perfect.

[benjaminwootton]

FWIW I agreed with you but downvoted because of the posting style.

The decision to avoid cross data center replication was probably a carefully considered one instead of amateurish. They probably have multiple layers of redundancy in their setup and decided that the cost and overhead of cross data centre replication was not justified.

In hindsight this doesn't seem like such a good decision, but I don't see how that makes someone an amateur or a fraud.

[Supreme]

Sorry, should have linked to previous evidence of the fact: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/09/has-joel-spolsky-ju...

[dreish]

I would suggest the following mental exercise the next time you want to make a comment on HN:

Imagine you are at a dinner party at Paul Graham's house. He's there, obviously, along with several startup founders, aspiring founders, and a few established industry figures, including the person you are about to disagree with or criticize.

It will undoubtedly take more effort to figure out how to frame your criticism so that it doesn't make you a pariah, but the advantage will be that you will leave open the possibility of forming beneficial business and personal relationships.

In this case, I would try describing your own successes with building redundant services, and describe some of the other approaches you found while researching ones that you have built.

[Supreme]

I've outlined how we solved this problem in another comment - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4717713

Incidentally, I'm not here to form relationships - personal or otherwise. The primary goal of social media sites is to indulge in procrastination while advertisers bombard us with new products, not to improve one's life. For the latter, there are books, actions and real people made of flesh and blood. This reminds me a lot of some of the people I encountered in my gaming days - they tend to forget about the context of the platform they are using.