this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
25 points (85.7% liked)

Selfhosted

40716 readers
483 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

The 6 nines mean that an ideal service should have 99,9999% uptime, right?

That's almost 32 seconds of downtime in a year!

If so, how much would it cost to do it? (Let's consider that is a marketplace site with 1000 daily users)

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] iAmNotorious 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

6 nines is really really difficult. It’s hard to estimate costs without specific requirements, but a marketplace site with 1000 daily users means you’re expecting about 1 user per minute, which isn’t a lot. I’d imagine you could get by with the cheapest cloud hosting.

The real problem is that most major cloud providers don’t offer 6 nines. Even AWS only offers credits below 99.5%, so you’d want to not lock yourself into a single provider. My best suggestion is to have a small/cheap server with all of the big names and load balance/round robin between them.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This.

At some point, you need to be able to quantify the risk to your business before you can do this.

For instance, if your business earns $10 per transaction, and you perform 100 transactions per second, the difference between five and six nines (313 seconds vs 31 seconds) is $282,000; nowhere near enough to justify the added investment.

Edit: Important to note that for the first example, these are already enormously huge numbers. Such a business, assuming no holidays or weekends, would be grossing $31.5 billion per year, in the same ballpark as Oracle and Coca Cola.

So when we say the company is losing 282,000, this is a tiny, tiny fraction of revenue. Even 99.5%, which is almost two days of downtime, would “only” be a loss of 0.5% of all revenue for the year. Sure, this is $157M, but even that would probably not cover the cost of a six nines infrastructure (that said, they could save up to $120M per year by achieving 99.9%, which would be worth exploring).