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Comment by datascienced | Hacker News Reader

Wat? If the site is down I’ll probably wont be back, and if I am paying for a service I am angry and might unsubscribe. Let alone lost revenue for the company from new sign ups or readers.

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Github was down for the nth time a few days ago. Yet I'm back. Who comes up with these stupid claims? I'm not going to ditch <messenger everyone in my friends circle is using> if they're down for a few minutes once a month. The supermarket at the corner had problems with their payment system for three days(!) last year and only took cash. I'm still a regular there. My favorite sushi place was closed for two months after a fire; I'm still going there.

If people stop using your site after it's been down once it can't be that good.

There are counterexamples yes. The almost monopoly on open source hosting. If Github goes down every day for an hour, companies will move to Gitlab. Obviously in business there are power dynamics. I queued for an hour to get an ice cream once. That seller was in a kids water park. Yet McDonalds did a hockey stick because they solved fast food. There are always exceptions where a business has you. Nice to own such a business!

> If Github goes down every day for an hour

Now that's what I call moving the goalposts :) suddenly we're at an hour a day.

Github wasn't the first OSS hosting platform, yet they managed to steal the show, and let me tell you a secret, it wasn't because they had less downtime than others. But if you want to keep telling yourself five nines is of utmost importance to your startup, more power to you.

Yes the goalposts move if you run a near monopoly with a huge mindshare. Let’s say you want an electric toothbrush. Amazon is down, you order from kmart or something. If Github is down you don’t simply migrate your entire Ci/Cd/code/issues/actions to something else. You are locked in! So they can afford crappier goalposts, but only so crappy.

You again moved the goalposts. First you suddenly argued I would move away from Github if they were down for an hour every day, when before, the question was whether a short downtime once a month would be acceptable or drive away customers. And now you suddenly say for Github those moved goalposts (ie one hour downtime per day) are acceptable because I'm already locked in, so contrary to your previous comment, I would not move to gitlab. But it seems you already decided you want to die on that hill, so you'll keep changing your story willy nilly.

I think you are arguing against a strawman of the worst interpretation of what I said. Which means we’d have to have a cross-examination type debate that I ain’t got the energy for.

You are assuming that there is a single thing called downtime (not a scale of slightly bad to outrageous) and a single set of considerations as to whether to move.

Why are you on HN? It had quiet a lot of downtimes/service degradations over the last year, and according to your claim you don't use services that aren't 100% available.

You snookered me there! Nice. But I will say that I have only seen it degraded, i.e. slow, not completely down.

Also it may matter less to HN which is a cult following. For a FAANGy type company of course it matters.

So you sold all your apple products last week? They had a full downtime after all.

Well maybe on your splunk dashboard but I have not experienced downtime of any Apple services.

It's almost like short downtimes don't matter, isn't it? And depending on the service, sometimes even multi-hour downtimes that make almost all of your services (store, music, arcade, fit,...) unusable like in apples case. Most of the users won't even notice, and if they do... They still come back.

Yes if the site is down you loose reader/buyers (in the end money)

But keeping the site up also cost money. So context is really important here. How much money do you spend on the last % of availability vs how much money so you loose on downtime. In my experience people have a more complicated setup then needed because of availability, but at the same time have not tested a real DR scenario.

Your sentence ANDs together an overlap of a bunch of improbable scenarios:

- if the site is down for more than a few seconds

- if you attempt to access the site during its downtime

- if you pay an ongoing subscription (this could very well be a non-profit site, or one that doesn't primarily drive its revenue from subscriptions)

- if you feel like unsubscribing

How much does this *really* affect a non-moonshot business?

The article talks about a high traffic site, maybe a top 10 one or something like that. It is already a moon business, not a moonshot. For a small blog or local business, sure a bit of downtime is OK but why are they even bare metal when squarespace etc. exists.

> The article talks about a high traffic site, maybe a top 10 one

The article explicitly restricts the problem space to top 1000 websites.

I've taken 30 seconds to browse through top 1000 websites and outside of the usual suspects up top, most of them look like https://www.pro-football-reference.com or https://www.tempo.co which to me are not far off blogs and local businesses.

Well for a top 10 site, it's $1000 a month dedicated or $1,000,000 a month cloud.

Then I have to ask if you're a customer I want to have. Customers with unreasonable demands (especially demands for absolute perfection) are a cost, not a revenue stream IMO.

Yeah agree - if a website doesn’t respond I immediately open google in another tab; if google doesn’t respond I blame my internet and swap to my phone.

We’re all on redundant internet connections now.

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