Startups do, and always should, focus on getting to market faster so they can get feedback from real customers.

I will take going to market faster over saving a few dollars on server costs everytime I'm given the choice.

Mature products' and companies' use cases are more nuanced.

Let's not go crazy, Apache on metal is a very simple setup and at least as secure as S3 out of the box. Platform spread and simplicity are just lost concepts, that's all.

> OVHcloud Best Value is a great way for you to experience the advantages of bare metal over virtual servers at an unbeatable price. Our Best Value bare metal servers feature the most stable environment, making it perfect for processing large volumes of data.

The terminology is "bare metal" when buying up dedicated servers these days. Some places still use the term "dedicated", but since the advent of "the cloud", the term "bare metal" has come up, since most instances are ASSUMED to be VPS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bare-metal_server https://www.ibm.com/cloud/bare-metal-servers/hosting-solutio... https://www.ionos.com/digitalguide/server/know-how/bare-meta... https://www.rackspace.com/library/what-is-a-bare-metal-serve...

This comment is claiming way too many victims. Shame, it'd be a rather exciting experiment!

Startups are very likely to fail before they need to scale. So that single-threaded C++ server, or whatever it is that the existing engineers are fastest at creating, is fine to get out there and get early market feedback.

The way I always balance this is to make the product manager put scaling and redundancy stories in the queue with feature stories. We'll build with scaling and redundancy in mind, but we don't do any extra work until the business decides those things are a higher priority than testing new hypotheses. And then I have them buy it in increments, so we can add automated load tests as we go. Then if we were to get into failwhale territory, it'd be a decision we all made together.

We had a business in one year and were acquired by a major Portuguese company, with luck the company did survive the crash, and exists nowadays as Altitude Software.

Some of the founders of that startup, left after a couple of years and founded Outsystems.

No cloud, no scripting languages with kubernetes scaling to fix lack of performance, no containers, no internet scale document databases.

Just pure C and C++, with a bit of TCL thrown into the mix, and Apache.

Absolutely. But are you telling me that a $5 p/m LAMP stack from a basic web hosting company (I'm a Microsoft dev so not sure what the FoM in Linux-land is) isn't worth it as a first step? That you have to use a bunch of bells and whistles from AWS or Azure or something?

And, if you're in the MS camp, surely a $10 p/m IIS/SQL hosted option is much easier than anything the big three have...

I'm not seeing the value proposition of cloud here...

It'll certainly take less time to manage than Kubernetes, that's fore sure.

> optimizing for a single server is a waste of resources

No, I think you should spend your time wisely and actually building your product. I don't think you should spend a huge amount of time to "optimize for a single server" (whatever that means), just that a single server can be enough for a large amount of traffic.

Many startups go all-in on complex architecture, microservices and Kubernetes from the get-go (or start splitting their monolith or whatever before it's necessary) and lose a huge amount of time setting all this up (when only Netflix-sized companies really need it) at a time where they should've focused on building their product.

The point here is that you can easily scale most apps in small steps without having to indebt yourself with complex architecture from the get go, which requires having to spend huge sums of cash on sysadmins and AWS bills that don't benefit your users.

For startups I personally believe in the more hybrid solution. I would use a cloud provider and manage the vms myself. For 100 dollars a month you can run 4 vms and a load balancer. Perfectly fine for even most scaleups. Aws, gcs and also azure are money pits. These companies to me resemble the oracle kind of company. The same btw goes for all these tooling companies like hubspot, Salesforce etc. Attractive in the beginning, but bloodsuckers after you become bigger.

This has to be hyperbole right? In any startup labor and rent is the dominant cost, not compute and other SaaS products.

This is just like when they got rid of secretaries. The work didn't go away, it just got moved to all the peons.

> Most of these startups in Soma could run their product on a single threaded C++ server.

Most could be run on a single threaded Python server.

Renting managed, dedicated servers is very inexpensive compared to cloud.

Some Java:

  public class Main {
    public int addTwoNumbers(int a, int b) {
      return a + b;
    }
  }

  (defun void-function (param)
    (let* ((class (jclass "Main"))
           (intclass (jclass "int"))
           (method (jmethod class "addTwoNumbers" intclass intclass))
           (result (jcall method param 2 4)))
      (format "calling addTwoNumbers(2, 4): ~a~%" result)))

  (defn f []
    (prn "calling addTwoNumbers(2, 4): " (.addTwoNumbers (Main.) 2 4)))

    (require :jss)

    (defun f() 
      (format t "calling addTwoNumbers(2, 4): ~A" (#"addTwoNumbers" 'Main 2 4))

The state of the art in web is React which is an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Win32's UI loop.

http://aperocky.com/prehistoric