Your site going down is pretty much the worst thing that can happen to a startup. But if you’re successful and your user base is growing fast, it’s bound to happen.

It sucks that your users can’t access your site and you can’t sign up new users. But the problem goes beyond that. At a startup, you’re trying to build features as fast as possible. You’re iterating and launching features every single day.

So your site breaking or having other ops related issues is a distraction. It means you stop building product, and probably means you have to go learn about the gory details of MySQL, nginx, or Delayed Job.

A couple years ago when Posterous started growing like a weed, we decided we needed a sys ops person. Our architecture was complex, issues kept coming up, and we needed to plan for scale.

We looked for someone for a while, but it was hard to find a good ops lead (and it’s probably harder now). You are going to trust your baby with this person!

After doing some research, we decided to outsource ops to a 3rd party called Bitpusher. We found this to be way more effective than to add a dedicated ops engineer to our small team.

Some of the advantages of using Bitpusher vs doing Ops in house:

1. Bitpusher costs us less per month than a full time hire. Plus we don’t have to pay benefits.
2. Instead of a single person, we get an ops team. This means we have 24/7 on call support.
3. Bitpusher has a lot of experience running ops. They have seen all kinds of architectures, and have used all sorts of technologies. They not only run our boxes, but gave us guidance in how to architect for scale.
4. We had to move datacenters (from Slicehost to Rackspace) and they were able to take on this entire process. They architected the system, transferred the data over, handled monitoring and backups, and more. This was something we weren’t looking forward to doing ourselves.

Ops isn’t our core competency. Where Posterous innovates and excels is helping normal people share photos from their mobile devices with the people they care about. Using Bitpusher allowed us to focus more on our own product and worry less about site operations.

If you’re interested in working with Bitpusher, let me know and I’ll gladly put you in touch. Full disclosure: we get a referral fee if we send them customers!