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Comment by jameshush | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious, what's stopping you from hosting on-premise and/or using your own runners?

Using your own runners GitHub doesn’t completely solve the problem, because GitHub won’t queue them to start the job during these outages.

We aren't a big enough team. The resources to do such a thing would mean less time focused on customers.

Maybe after another doubling we will have these options available. We should be a perfect fit at this stage for a hosted solution. Github is making themselves unviable for a company at this stage (low $XX million ARR)

"We aren't big enough to self-host" is an example of the effectiveness of SaaS sales pitches.

Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of good reasons to go cloud.

There's not a lot of good reasons for a build system to be completely down with no backup plans when your SaaS provider has an outage.

What does even just Github Actions' availability look like for March? 90%? That's pretty brutal for what should be a five nines service.

We can run the CI by hand or move it to another platform. But it takes some time and effort. This uptime is abysmal and has already stalled my work days twice in the last few weeks so maybe it’s worth the change

We have other tools that are self hosted and they require regular maintenance to security patch, write storage retention policies when some stupid log fills up, have backups, migrate cloud images, stop using plugin with deprecated api, etc. This stuff can also be unplanned and even scheduled becomes a regular chore taking time away from customers.

I know the on-prem sharks smell blood in the water but on-prem is not all upside and not the default answer to hosted services having downtime.

For example we could be on another DevOps SaaS and have zero downtime in March.

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