have a hostage plan

I recently read a schadenfreude article about AWS having an outage and how that caused some smart bulbs to stop listening to their smart switches. Imagine flipping a switch in your house and it having to go to a different state before the light bulb turns on. #LightSwitchasaService

Now I am not a purebred luddite, but I do like to lean into that side sometimes and remind myself that for all the downsides there are with self-hosting your data and services, the upside is that you have true control over it. In my work the common scenario is a hybrid form of Self-Hosted and Web Services. I know this sounds fancy and enterprise-like, but no! Its as simple as using old-school QuickBooks Desktop for ownership of data, combined with Method CRM for the convenience of a web platform. Method and Quickbooks have a lot of feature duplication which is another way to say redundancy.

My day job involves making tidy workflow automations for my clients so they don’t have to go to 4 different services to complete one task. Chasing this result is full of benefits, but the flipside to this is that if your One Service to Rule them All stops working one day (because it fell into Mt. Doom), what do you do?

Sticky notes for the day? An excel file to be uploaded later? Send invoices manually from QuickBooks? As an owner, any of these could be acceptable if you clap you hands, roll up your sleeves, and rally your team by reminding them that flexibility and some thinking can get your around this hurdle.

Services will go down, even ones you manage yourself internally. Consider what your mindset is about your services and see if you are overconfident about their reliability. Or check your confidence! Often you can get the status page of any service provider by going to “status.SERVICE-YOU-USE.com” like this: status.method.me