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Comment by JuniperMesos | Hacker News Reader

I don't have a problem with an open source project I use (and I do use F-Froid) hosting a server in a basement. I do have a problem with having the entire project hosted on one server in a basement, because it means that the entire project goes down if that basement gets flooded or the house burns down or the power goes out for an extended period of time, etc.

Having two servers in two basements not near each other would be good, having five would be better, and honestly paying money to put them in colo facilities to have more reliable power, cooling, etc. would be better still. Computer hardware is very cheap today and it doesn't cost that much money to get a substantial amount of redundancy, without being dependent on any single big company.

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This sounds reasonable. But this is a build server, not the entire project infrastructure.

I bet the server should be quite powerful, with tons of CPU, RAM and SSD/NVMe to allow for fast builds. Memory of all kinds was getting more and more expensive this year, so the prolonged sourcing is understandable.

The trusted contributor, as the text says, is considered more trustworthy than an average colocation company. Maybe they have an adequate "basement", e.g. run their own colo company, or something.

It would be great to have a spare server, but likely it's not that simple, including the organization and the trust. A build server would be a very juicy attack target to clandestinely implant spyware.

What do you think would happen if that server went down? People can't get app updates, or install new ones. That is all. That is not critical.

They can then probably whip up a new hosted server to take over within a few days, at most. Big deal.

They are not hosting a critical service, and running on donations. They are doing everything right.

I concur, and given the amount of apps they build it makes sense to spend the money on a good build server to me, especially if it is someone with experience hosting trusted servers as mentioned as well as a contributor already. If people do not want to use it, the source code to build yourself is still available for the apps they supply.

It is not your bank. You don't need 99.999999999999999% availability of the build server of an app store. Especially if the apps packages can still be downloaded from regular https servers.

> Computer hardware is very cheap today

As long as you don't need RAM or hard drives. It's getting more expensive all the time too. This isn't the ideal moment to replace a laptop let alone a server.

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