Comment by graemep

There is this weird thing that happens with hyperscale - the combination of highly central decision-making, extreme interconnection / interdependence of parts, and the attractiveness of lots of money all conspire to create a system pulled by unstable attractors to a fracturing point (slowed / mitigated at least a little by the inertia of such a large ship).

Are smaller scale services more reliable? I think that's too simple a question to be relevant. Sometimes yes, sometimes no, but we know one thing for sure - when smaller services go down the impact radius is contained. When a corrupt MBA who wants to pump short term metrics for a bonus gains power, the damage they can do is similarly contained. All risk factors are boxed in like this. With a hyperscale business, things are capable of going much more wrong for many more people, and the recursive nature of vertical+horizontal integration causes a calamity engine that can be hard to correct.

Take the financial sector in 08. Huge monoliths that had integrated every kind of financial service with every other kind of financial service. Few points of failure, every failure mode exposed to every other failure mode.

There's a reason asymmetric warfare is hard for both parties - cellular networks of small units that can act independently are extremely fault tolerant and robust against changing conditions. Giants, when they fall, do so in spectacular fashion.

> Smaller providers have a much stronger incentive to be reliable, as they will lose customers if they are not.

Hard disagree. A smaller provider will think twice about whether they use a Tier 1 data center versus a Tier IV data center because the cost difference is substantial and in many cases prohibitively expensive.

> A lot of people want the brand recognition too.

Not to mention the familiarity of the company, its services and expectations. You can hire people with experience with AWS, Azure or GCP, but the more niche you go, the higher the possibility that some people you hire might not know how to work with those systems and their nuances, which is fine they can learn as they work, but that adds to ramp up time and could lead to inadvertent mistakes happening.

I've actually tried hetzner on and off with 1 server for the past 2 years and keep running into downtime every few months.

First I used an ex101 with an i9-13900. Within a week it just froze. It could not be reset remotely. Nothing in kern.log. Support offered no solution but a hard reboot. No mention of what might be wrong other than user error.

A few months later, one of the drives just disconnects from raid by itself. It took support 1 hour to respond and they said they found no issue so it must be my fault.

Then I changed to a ryzen based server and it also mysteriously had problems like this. Again the support blamed the user.

It was only after I cancelled the server and several months later that I see this so I know it isn't just me.

https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/dedicated-server/general-info...

I think cloudflare has billions worth of incentives to be reliable however they can slip up, it happens and that's why centralization is bad.

>I have sometimes been told its unprofessional or looks bad to run things yourself instead of using a managed service.

That's an incredibly bad take lol.

There are times where "The Cloud" makes sense, sure. But in my experience the majority of the time companies over-use the cloud. On Prem is GOOD. It's cheaper, arguably more secure if you configure it right (a challenge, I know, but hear me out) and gives you data sovereignty.

I don't quite think companies realize how bad it would be if EG AWS was hacked.

Any Data you have on the cloud is no longer your data. Not really. It's Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, whoevers.

> Less complexity to go wrong.

This sounds like a good thing.

> Smaller providers have a much stronger incentive to be reliable, as they will lose customers if they are not.

I disagree because conversely, outages for larger providers cause millions or maybe even billions of dollars in losses for its customers. They might be more "stuck" in their current providers' proprietary schemes, but these kinds of losses will cause them to move away, or at least diversify cloud providers. In turn, this will cause income losses to the cloud provider.

And they sell when get big but can't afford to be.