I know about hyperbole for making a point, but does Basecamp really total anything like a week's downtime per year? If so, why? I'm pretty sure I've never had anything like that bad a number and equally that I wouldn't be happy using a service that did.
The general thrust is right: high reliability is expensive and you need to look at cost/benefit not chest-beating. But let's be honest about what we're actually aiming at.
This article is from 2005. It's quite likely that Basecamp's downtime was around a week per year. At that time, Rails was expected to have ~400 restarts a day[1] ;)
* 1 minute every hour, or
* 3h20 every week, or
* 1 week every year
I know about hyperbole for making a point, but does Basecamp really total anything like a week's downtime per year? If so, why? I'm pretty sure I've never had anything like that bad a number and equally that I wouldn't be happy using a service that did.
The general thrust is right: high reliability is expensive and you need to look at cost/benefit not chest-beating. But let's be honest about what we're actually aiming at.