Re:Why Reddit was down for 6 hours
by jedberg on Friday March 18, 2011 @03:03AM
(#2339652)
reddit actually is a top 100 site, but we don't have nearly the need to host our own datacenter or co-locate. If we do make a move, it will be to #2. I don't want to hire people to be hands on -- I'd rather outsource that and let someone else pay to have spare capacity laying around.
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what kind of scale are you at? I mean, about how many 32GiB ram/8 core servers would you need if you were using real hardware?
We have ~130 servers at Amazon right now. We could probably do it with 50-75 or less, depending on how big the boxes are.
conde would very easily do this for you, they built an entire datacenter in deleware just for their child-companies to use like this.
Yes, they could. It is an option.
Fair enough; 100 was sort of arbitrary, but there is some metric when you're sort of at google scale and cutting down on power costs or achieving absolute minimum latencies between datacenters has a meaningful impact on the bottom line. Draw a line somewhere, and yeah, Reddit is probably on the other side.
Reddit has always amazed me with what they can do with extremely limited resources.
But it looks like that attitude has finally caught up with them, especially since they are down to just 3 technical staff (from 5 last week), and two of them are brand new.