Practicalmadness

Over at Signal vs. Noise, David has a very interesting, very pragmatic take on the dreaded topic of uptime in this new web 2.0 era:

Jeremy Wright purports a common misconception about new companies doing business online: That you need 99.999% uptime or you’re toast. Not so. Basecamp doesn’t have that. I think our uptime is more like 98% or 99%. Guess what, we’re still here!

If you’re Wal-Mart and your credit card processing pipeline stops for 30 minutes during prime time, yes, the world does end. Someone might very well be fired…Now what if Delicious, Feedster, or Technorati goes down for 30 minutes? How big is the inconvenience of not being able to get to your tagged bookmarks or do yet another ego-search with Feedster or Technorati for 30 minutes? Not that high. The world does not come to an end. Nobody gets fired.

Om Malik thinks that the running-with-scissors approach of most start-ups is a sign of a bubble. Awahh? The bubble was when people thought they needed to spend $3 million dollars buying Sun servers and Oracle databases to build a site for wedding invitations.

This is especially relevant given our recent server troubles here at Practicalmadness, but as I finally realized before deciding to stick with TextDrive being the maker of a site and one of its users are totally different perspectives. I certainly don’t appreciate it when a service I rely on and pay for goes down regularly and without warning, but I can acknowledge that it’s not the end of the world if I have to jot something down on paper and wait 30 minutes before I Backpack it.

I extended my quotation from David’s post to the bit about wedding invitations for a reason. I started working on Cmere, our upcoming event planning/announcements web app, after I realized that if I wanted to have a place online to send and receive invitations for my housewarming party I really had no choice but to use Evite, which I think is exemplary of those sites that (during the Bubble in the late ’90s) burned through millions of dollars so you could buy pet food online. I don’t think Evite’s user experience is horrible, but it can be made much better and I have an idea or two about how to accomplish that.

Do I have $30M or a spare Sun server laying around? Am I using a Microsoft application framework backed by an enterprise database solution? No, but I have access to open source application frameworks, backed by free, open source databases, running (for now, at least) on month-to-month shared hosting. My total annual cost to run my websites is less than a thousand dollars; the only difference between me and Evite is that I will almost certainly have less uptime. But seriously: I think we can all handle it if my invites site is down for 30 minutes, yes?