Hacker News Reader

Uptime is my justification.

I do put most things on my home box (certainly can't put my media server data on $5 VPS!), but stuff like my XMPP server, websites, etc. that I want available even when my power or Internet goes out live on a VPS.

View on HN

For me it's not exactly "uptime" I care about, but the fact that if there's a power cut on the first day of a 2-week trip, my home server is then offline for the duration. I don't mind sporadic downtime if I'm home and can fix it at my convenience, but it's pretty inconvenient if I'm not home and can't fix something I rely on.

(That being said, I don't actually use a VPS, I just pay for SaaS apps for things I don't want to self-host for the reason above.)

I'm curious why do you need manual intervention after a power cut. Isn't configuring bios enough for this?

1. Power cuts typically aren't clean off and back-on events — they're often e.g. in storms and involve intermittent losses and/or restorations. I don't really want my devices trying to boot up again every time the power flickers.

2. A number of my devices are on battery backup of some sort — they'll cleanly shut down on low-battery, but turning back on when power is restored is non-trivial in this case.

3. Sometimes a device won't come back cleanly after reboot and will require some manual intervention.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com