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Comment by edw519 | Hacker News Reader

I think the real question is one of reliability. Which is the most likely to fail, your server, your host's, or something on the cloud? How many 9's do we need before we can evolve?

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I do wonder about building services on top of services on top of services. Since you have to multiply their availability, you get an overall level of service that's lower than each of its components. I think the answer for high reliability built on top of services will be to have each layer run off of multiple services (for example: storage on S3 AND local servers AND someone else's cloud disk) with seamless failover between them. Lots of work, but if you can't stand to be down, them's the breaks.

sounds like "stacking of errors" that will put the whole operation out of tolerance fairly quickly.

At the end of the day, they're all likely to fail. Provided of course that you know how to setup and maintain a server (farm) in the first place. If you don't, you have no business being a SaaS provider.

However, when your own servers fail, YOU can generally react faster than when someone elses server fails, and you rely on them to fix the outage and get you back online. This is especially true for SaaS startups. When Rackspace had their issues last year, and had to shutdown "some" servers because their datacenter was overheating, who do you think they shutdown? The startups with 2 or 3 servers, or the BigCo's with 2 or 3 full cabinets?

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