Thomas Hawk, who is the CEO of Zooomr, tells a story about being woken up in the middle of the night to go fix something and get that service back online. Good read to remind you that being an entrepreneur isn’t all that glamourous sometimes. What’s amazing is that he met me that morning, made lots of great images, and didn’t say anything to me about being up all night the night before.
Me? My plane still hasn’t arrived. High winds are keeping the flights out at SFO. So, I’m on the floor at gate 22 doing email and reading feeds and all that. UPDATE: plane is loading. See what you’re missing over on Twitter? Heheh.
Scobleizer 
High winds…see you shortly!
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High winds…see you shortly!
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Being an entrepreneur has its moments in the spotlight. However, most of the time, you’re running around making sure all the big and small tasks are getting completed. The big tasks can be glamorous and exciting, but you can’t ignore the small tasks either.
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Being an entrepreneur has its moments in the spotlight. However, most of the time, you’re running around making sure all the big and small tasks are getting completed. The big tasks can be glamorous and exciting, but you can’t ignore the small tasks either.
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Zooomr story is called “pay someone else to take care of the hardware at the data center”. I mean, you’re already paying someone for the conectivity. So do the same for the hardware and save yourself some driving in the middle of the night.
I lived Chris’s life for 2-3 years with my first startup, did what I just mentioned (got someone else to take care of that stuff), and I would never ever go back. While you’re a startup, you most likely still need to wake up and stay up, but at least you don’t have to leave home. Besides, depending on just yourself is an extremely dangerous proposition for this kind of business – what if you’re 200 miles away for whatever reason?
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Zooomr story is called “pay someone else to take care of the hardware at the data center”. I mean, you’re already paying someone for the conectivity. So do the same for the hardware and save yourself some driving in the middle of the night.
I lived Chris’s life for 2-3 years with my first startup, did what I just mentioned (got someone else to take care of that stuff), and I would never ever go back. While you’re a startup, you most likely still need to wake up and stay up, but at least you don’t have to leave home. Besides, depending on just yourself is an extremely dangerous proposition for this kind of business – what if you’re 200 miles away for whatever reason?
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RBA – yeh but can you get some one who know the system that well that you trust not to mess up.
I know Large comapnies (over 100k employees) that had an entire months payroll run blown away because the agency tape op managed to destroy not only the tape that the run went in on but all the back up copies.
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RBA – yeh but can you get some one who know the system that well that you trust not to mess up.
I know Large comapnies (over 100k employees) that had an entire months payroll run blown away because the agency tape op managed to destroy not only the tape that the run went in on but all the back up copies.
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Why was he in charge of keeping the site up, isn’t that what you hire people for?
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Why was he in charge of keeping the site up, isn’t that what you hire people for?
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I think you do not talk about those “sleep challenged” nights after a while because you think everyone has them.
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I think you do not talk about those “sleep challenged” nights after a while because you think everyone has them.
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I only have two words (or one word and an acronym if you will) for this, remote KVM.
It’s also suprising to me that a single disk failure could bring down an entire public service. I don’t make any money of my little hobby site, and I have more redundancy in place than that.
As for paying someone else for hardware, if you’re an unfunded startup it is by far more cost effective in terms of features and reliability to purchase your own hardware than to rent. The amount of money hosting companies charge for a white box single disk, single cpu, single IDE drive’d machine is rediculous. These machines are more prone to failure and have far less performance than even a base model Dell system. They are basically cheap desktop machines with Xeon’s or Opterons’s.
Ask for anything near a real server’s specs and you’re talking $1K per month for a single machine. If I can buy better hardware for $4K outright and get more bandwidth than the dedicated contract gave me for 1/10th the monthly cost, it just doesn’t make sense not to.
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I only have two words (or one word and an acronym if you will) for this, remote KVM.
It’s also suprising to me that a single disk failure could bring down an entire public service. I don’t make any money of my little hobby site, and I have more redundancy in place than that.
As for paying someone else for hardware, if you’re an unfunded startup it is by far more cost effective in terms of features and reliability to purchase your own hardware than to rent. The amount of money hosting companies charge for a white box single disk, single cpu, single IDE drive’d machine is rediculous. These machines are more prone to failure and have far less performance than even a base model Dell system. They are basically cheap desktop machines with Xeon’s or Opterons’s.
Ask for anything near a real server’s specs and you’re talking $1K per month for a single machine. If I can buy better hardware for $4K outright and get more bandwidth than the dedicated contract gave me for 1/10th the monthly cost, it just doesn’t make sense not to.
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Neuromancer, if you never delegate certain tasks to someone else “because they don’t know about it as much as you do”, then you have a very serious “human” escalation problem that will only get worst over time.
It takes skills to delegate and actually not everybody can do it right, but the truth is, the longer you wait, the harder it’ll be.
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Neuromancer, if you never delegate certain tasks to someone else “because they don’t know about it as much as you do”, then you have a very serious “human” escalation problem that will only get worst over time.
It takes skills to delegate and actually not everybody can do it right, but the truth is, the longer you wait, the harder it’ll be.
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RBA
It was beacuse of cost cutting by bean counters that dont understand IT that the problem occured.
Having said that theer are some bits of BT I wouldn’ trust to run a bath.
I used to be on the BT worldwide Intranet team and we actualy ran and supported the intranet hardware because TPTB whernt interested/didnt have the skils.
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RBA
It was beacuse of cost cutting by bean counters that dont understand IT that the problem occured.
Having said that theer are some bits of BT I wouldn’ trust to run a bath.
I used to be on the BT worldwide Intranet team and we actualy ran and supported the intranet hardware because TPTB whernt interested/didnt have the skils.
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