Tons of people have bookmarked, linked, or otherwise referenced this post on how many 9s of uptime you need at the Signal versus Noise blog.
I particularly like this quote:
Om Malik thinks that the running-with-scissors approach of most start-ups is a sign of a bubble. Awahh? The bubble was when people thought they needed to spend $3 million dollars buying Sun servers and Oracle databases to build a site for wedding invitations.
The business smarts is when you don’t blow the farm before the crap shot has turned sure bet. Fail cheap. Because odds are you’re going to. And you need to have your shirt for the second round.
This corroborates exactly what Paul Kedrosky said at a recent Vancouver Enterprise Forum.
Fail fast. Fail cheap.
You’ll eventually find something good.