[HN Gopher] How much can you get out of a $4 VPS?
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How much can you get out of a $4 VPS?
Author : zer0tonin
Score : 437 points
Date : 2023-02-06 12:02 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (alicegg.tech)
(TXT) w3m dump (alicegg.tech)
| grapesurgeon wrote:
| [dead]
| kristianpaul wrote:
| A lot? https://lowendbox.com/blog/yes-you-can-run-18-static-
| sites-o... Its 2009 but the point imho is that with floss there
| are always alternatives
| uvesten wrote:
| The article does not really answer the question in any meaningful
| way, just tests a CRUD blogging server written in go, using a
| mongodb database (both dockerized...)
|
| If you expect any comprehensive benchmarks or testing, save the
| time.
| detaro wrote:
| Although a major point with most cheap providers is what you
| don't get: consistency in performance and reliability.
| (Although $4 is not the deepest bargain barrel yet, so not
| necessarily that bad)
| Havoc wrote:
| Except the $4 vps generally have fair use clauses. So you can't
| actually sustain what the load test shows. 20% of it is common as
| reference point for sustained use though often judgemental
| [deleted]
| guardiangod wrote:
| I've used everything from expensive dedicated servers, cheap
| dedicated servers (Atom, Pentium 4), to all levels of VPS, cloud
| VPS, and now I finally settle on hosting everything in my
| parent's home.
|
| With gigabit symmetric fiber connection (that I paid for) I don't
| see why I need to host stuff on other people's infrastructure. I
| can control backup in person.
|
| I don't need to worry about the hoster upgrade a SAS controller
| and boink the RAID-ed hard drive, or complaints about copyright
| materials etc, or the hoster snooping on the servers for
| sensitive data, or that the hoster suddenly go out of business
| and take all my data with it, or that I reach the monthly 1000TB
| limit.
|
| My parents even get to use gigabit connection for free so it's a
| win-win.
| rwaksmunski wrote:
| Not sure about $4 but for $40 I get a dedicated box with Intel
| i7-8700, 128GB RAM, 1TB of NVME storage and 1Gbe of bandwidth at
| Hetzner. That is a lot of machine for the money.
| im_jerry87 wrote:
| No way you are getting a dedicated box with 128 GB RAM and 1 TB
| NVME for just $40. Are you referring to server auction?
| Gregoriy wrote:
| 4$ VPS will be fine intil they ban you as such load(as in the
| test) will violate their "good neighbor" policy
| asmor wrote:
| I can think of at least two that wouldn't.
|
| Hetzner Cloud allocates you 20TB per VPS (yes, even the cheap
| ones) and lets you use that however you see fit. There have
| been about 2 known instances of Hetzner kicking off dedicated
| (not VPS) customers for traffic abuse, and those customers were
| saturating the link 24/7 and were offered dedicated lines ahead
| of time. (their actual pain limit seems to be averaging over
| 750Mbit/s for 2-3 months). Their network team gets very upset
| if you scan _from_ the instances, but not usually to keep a
| single limited interface from being saturated.
|
| Netcup will throttle you 100 Mbit if you exceed 80 TB a month.
| Even on their 3,25 EUR VPS product.
| [deleted]
| raybb wrote:
| Does anyone have tips for managing/monitoring a few cheap VPS? I
| have one that I pay $4 a year for and only use it as a Syncthing
| middle between my laptop and phone. I also have a few other small
| ones that I use for single purposes. However, I don't have a good
| way to see how much storage is on each VPS and the CPU
| utilization without sshing into them to check.
| m-o11y wrote:
| https://opsverse.io/observenow-observability/ ...As close to
| free as possible since the cost is primarily driven by amount
| of ingestion. Works great for small setups with scope to grow
| over time!
|
| Disclaimer: I work there
| kenniskrag wrote:
| I use cockpit but maybe too much:
|
| https://cockpit-project.org/running
| MonkeyClub wrote:
| I use cockpit widely as well. I too was initially concerned
| that it may be an overkill as well, but it solves so many
| more administrative problems than just metrics, that I've
| found it's worth the few extra resources used.
| susadmin wrote:
| I have heard Nagios works well for monitoring.
| discordance wrote:
| https://github.com/MichaelBelgium/VPS-Monitor
| zer0tonin wrote:
| I would use telegraf (https://github.com/influxdata/telegraf)
| to gather the metrics you want from your servers. It has built-
| in functions to get metrics like disk usage, cpu, etc...
|
| From there I would export those metrics to a grafana+influxdb
| setup. But honestly this is because that's what I'm used to
| professionally. There might be simpler solutions around.
| hu3 wrote:
| where can I get a VPS for $4/year?
|
| I could use one for things like remote cronjobs.
| nbk_2000 wrote:
| You can find Frantech servers for as little as $3.50/year
| here:
|
| https://my.frantech.ca/aff.php?aff=3460
|
| This is the parent company of BuyVM. They have a very good
| reputation, but their stock goes up and down throughout the
| month. If you want a specific data-center location, wait
| until the first of the month when stock replenishes.
| hoppyhoppy2 wrote:
| The servers at this affiliate link start at $3.50/month. Am
| I missing something? What service is $3.50/year?
| ddtaylor wrote:
| Vultr
| hereforphone wrote:
| As I said above I had a bad customer service experience
| with them. I've used a lot of hosting providers and Vultr
| was the most ghetto-feeling by far. Back to Digital Ocean
| for me, or if they stop hosting custom images, I'll try and
| find another
| defrost wrote:
| https://cron-job.org/en/faq/ How much is the
| service of cron-job.org? Our service is entirely free
| of charge.
|
| ( Some resource limits apply )
| gl-prod wrote:
| How come its free?
| newaccount74 wrote:
| Some people like helping others even if there's nothing
| in it for them. Like icanhazip.com
| hu3 wrote:
| I use them and they are great. But I need longer timeout
| settings.
| raybb wrote:
| I bought it from VirMach on Cyber Monday back in 2017. It was
| a pretty good deal and they've stuck to it. I've barely used
| the box for anything over the years but it's nice to have.
|
| I think you'll still find deals like this on lowendbox
| occasionally.
|
| Original deal: https://lowendbox.com/blog/cyber-monday-
| virmach-vps-deals-as...
| dm wrote:
| If you're happy not having a home-grown open source solution,
| New Relic is essentially free if you don't have many servers
| and turn off extended metrics. If you start adding in more
| integrations, it's gonna cost you, but for basic monitoring and
| nice graphs hosted externally from your systems itself, it
| works nicely.
| megadeth wrote:
| Highly recommend https://hetrixtools.com.
| t_sawyer wrote:
| https://github.com/netdata/netdata
| lbriner wrote:
| Pretty typical BS article. Profile a pointless small app (written
| in Go, fast but used by very few people) and then caveat that
| your mileage may vary.
|
| It sure does. Having to size for peaks and troughs, for when the
| updates are running, for when you get a spike in traffic, for
| when you need to use a slightly under-performing DB library or
| some connections to cache.
|
| The only thing this small server would be any good for would be a
| static web site, pretending that any web app would work on a tiny
| vps is just not true.
| Ologn wrote:
| I've had a $20 a month Linode VPS for over ten years. I have a
| $13 a month Ramnode VPS as secondary or backup for a lot of
| things, like DNS.
|
| At one point I was pretty steadily making $2000 a month revenue
| on my side business, sometimes peaking to $3000. Mostly serving
| up JSON (or XML at one point) as well as media like PNGs or
| epub's or the like.
|
| The Linode has 4 gigs RAM, 2 CPU cores, 80 gigs storage, runs
| Debian. I'm given 4 TB of net traffic a month, but I never even
| got to 1 TB a month.
|
| I did look at VPS's which were even cheaper at the time - less
| than $10 a month, but I passed on them, $400 a year for VPSs was
| within my allocated budget, especially since revenue was over
| $20,000 a year.
| Tepix wrote:
| If you like cheap VPS, hang out at lowendtalk.com and
| lowendbox.com. Depending on your requirements you can sometimes
| get lucky at $12/year or less.
| znpy wrote:
| > Depending on your requirements you can sometimes get lucky at
| $12/year or less.
|
| Had one of those when I was a broke student, and found that on
| lowendtalk.com as you suggest.
|
| Needless to say, the company literally VANISHED after a few
| months.
|
| If an offer is too good to be true...
| bingobongodude wrote:
| 1blu is running such a deal right now (4 cores 8gb ram 120gb
| ssd)
| turtlebits wrote:
| The problem is that not all $4 VPS offer the same baseline perf.
| Unless you have the time/money to go sign up/provision/load test
| from a set of providers, it's definitely hit or miss.
|
| That said, you shouldn't dismiss cheap hosting, I use a $4.5 VPS
| to constantly encode h.265 and it's been a great value.
| einpoklum wrote:
| For those who don't know the lingo (like me):
|
| "A virtual private server (VPS) is a machine that hosts all the
| software and data required to run an application or website. It
| is called virtual because it only consumes a portion of the
| server's underlying physical resources which are managed by a
| third-party provider. However, you get access to your dedicated
| resources on that hardware."
|
| (define on Amazon's website)
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| It used to be that growth rate and market capture was the most
| important metrics. The value of a marginal feature was far in
| excess of anything that would save money on infra, or that might
| delay engineers from deploying the next feature.
|
| With the fed increasing rates, engineer salaries falling, and the
| market now valuing profit over sales, this is no longer true.
|
| The companies that do not adapt to this reality will have subpar
| results.
| sys42590 wrote:
| I'm a big fan of VMs cheaper than 5$ a month.
|
| And you can do a LOT using such VMs, now that most are hosted on
| SSDs instead of spinning disks.
|
| My take-away points are the following:
|
| 1) Beware of cheap OpenVZ offers (e.g. on LEB or WHT),
| performance is usually worse than offers with proper
| virtualization like KVM, and the need to patch OpenVZ into the
| kernel causes most offerings to use a more or less outdated Linux
| Kernel leading to a very questionable level of security.
|
| 2) If your VM hosts "serious" data, you should better make sure
| to do your research and use a reputable hosting provider. This
| may potentially cost a bit more but will save you a lot of
| headache in the future.
|
| 3) Unless it's just a toy project, you should look into enabling
| replication of your data across two or three different VPS
| providers. While this at most triples your performance, the
| reliability will increase at least tenfold.
| doubled112 wrote:
| I experimented with OpenVZ at home for some time many years ago
| and I'm always amazed to see that it's still offered anywhere.
|
| I'd have thought even LXC would have universally taken over by
| now. Who is still running CentOS 6 as a host?
| sys42590 wrote:
| Some companies are still offering OpenVZ because it allows to
| heavily oversell RAM, CPU and storage bandwidth with somewhat
| graceful degradation of guest performance.
|
| I think OpenVZ has kernel patches for RHEL7's 3.10.x kernel,
| which is supported by Red Hat till 2024. So in theory it's
| possible to have a secure OpenVZ VM but in reality bad
| practices (like heavy overselling the hardware) flock
| together.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Hosting stuff on small machines was why I came up with
| https://github.com/piku, and I still use it for those - I spent a
| long time trying to cram LXC, Docker and the like into single-
| core machines, and wanted a way to make it as painless as
| possible.
|
| These days I'm running my static site builder, a few scrapers/RSS
| converters and a number of Mastodon-related services on it, on
| various kinds of cloud and physical hardware...
| jwr wrote:
| I know it's not in fashion, but I will suggest that renting
| physical servers is a very good and under-appreciated compromise.
| As an example, 45EUR/month gets you a 6-core AMD with 64GB of RAM
| and NVMe SSDs at Hetzner. That's a lot of computing power!
|
| Virtualized offerings perform significantly worse (see my 2019
| experiments: https://jan.rychter.com/enblog/cloud-server-cpu-
| performance-...) and cost more. The difference is that you can
| "scale on demand", which I found not to be necessary, at least in
| my case. And if I do need to scale, I can still do that, it's
| just that getting new servers takes hours instead of seconds.
| Well, I don't need to scale in seconds.
|
| In my case, my entire monthly bill for the full production
| environment and a duplicate staging/standby environment is
| constant, simple, predictable, very low compared to what I'd need
| to pay AWS, and I still have a lot of performance headroom to
| grow.
|
| One thing worth noting is that I treat physical servers just like
| virtual ones: everything is managed through ansible and I can
| recreate everything from scratch. In fact, I do use another
| "devcloud" environment at Digital Ocean, and that one is spun up
| using terraform, before being passed on to ansible that does the
| rest of the setup.
| rakoo wrote:
| I can use a 4$ VPS for my own personal cloud. I will never pay
| 45$ for that.
|
| There's a whole band of people who have the technical chops to
| self-host, or host little instances for their
| family/friends/association/hiking club. This small margin where
| you're ok to spend a little extra because you want to make it
| proper, but you can't justify paying so much _and_ spend time
| doing hard maintenance. A small VPS, with a shared Nextcloud or
| a small website, is all that 's needed in many cases.
| ThatMedicIsASpy wrote:
| I pay 6euro for a root (ovh/kimsufi).
|
| atom 2c/4t, 4gb ram, 1tb drive, 100mbit
|
| A few years of uptime at this point
| intelVISA wrote:
| Same. Really good value if I'm honest!
| fuzzy2 wrote:
| > A few years of uptime at this point
|
| If uninterrupted: some upgrade may be due. ;-)
|
| Kernel security updates are a thing.
|
| ---
|
| I found Atoms to be unbearably slow, even with Linux. Of
| course it's enough for serving websites and whatnot, but
| it's baffling how much power they use just... not
| performing.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > I can use a 4$ VPS for my own personal cloud. I will never
| pay 45$ for that.
|
| Exactly. These sub-$10 VPS instances are great for small
| projects where you don't want to enter into long contracts or
| deal with managing your own servers.
|
| If you're running an actual business where margins are razor-
| thin and you've got all the free time in the world to handle
| server issues if (when) they come up, those ~$50 dedicated
| servers could be interesting to explore.
|
| But if you're running an actual business, even a
| $10,000/month AWS bill is cheaper than hiring another skilled
| developer to help manage your dedicated servers.
|
| This is what's generally missed in discussions about cloud
| costs on places like HN: Yes, cloud is expensive, but hiring
| even a single additional sysadmin/developer to help you
| manage custom infrastructure is incredibly expensive and much
| less flexible. That's why spending a hypothetical $5000/month
| on a cloud hosted solution that could, in theory, be custom-
| built on a $50/month server with enough time investment can
| still be a great deal. Engineers are expensive and time is
| limited.
| bruce343434 wrote:
| > But if you're running an actual business, even a
| $10,000/month AWS bill is cheaper than hiring another
| skilled developer to help manage your dedicated servers.
|
| Uhhh, excuse me but how much are you paying this DevOps
| guy? This seems like a very American perspective, even
| valley area. In Europe, hiring a guy would be cheaper.
| baq wrote:
| Where do you find these people you say are available for
| hire in Europe? I see scarcely little
| codazoda wrote:
| > host little instances for their
| family/friends/association/hiking club
|
| For this I even use a little Raspberry Pi 400 in my bedroom.
|
| https://joeldare.com/private-analtyics-and-my-raspberry-
| pi-4...
| dmonitor wrote:
| I would like to hide my IP address in case an internet
| rando wants to ddos, though
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| How realistic is this concern? Like actually?
|
| I've self hosted my own stuff for close to a decade now.
| Nobody has tried DDoSing my setup, because why would
| they? What benefit would they possibly get out of it? I
| would be pretty much the only person affected, and once
| they stop it wouldn't take long to recover.
|
| There is little to no incentive to DDoS a personal box,
| let alone by a "internet rando".
| bruce343434 wrote:
| Having played games online: what they gain could be as
| stupid as "haha I inconvenienced you because you pissed
| me off"
| rambambram wrote:
| Got an RSS feed for your new blog?
| troupe wrote:
| Once you know you are going to use the machine for a while,
| buying two used server (one for backup) and co-locating them
| somewhere breaks even pretty quickly.
| duxup wrote:
| I recall an HN user talking about their overly complicated
| cloud setup and ... they found they could just do the job
| substantially faster on their local GPU.
| SergeAx wrote:
| The problem with bare metal is quite sophisticated contingency
| plan for physical failure. With VMs when any one of them fails
| - you just re-run your Terraform/Ansible scipts, restore backup
| (if it was a stateful VM that failed) and voila, you are up and
| running again in minutes.
| kuschku wrote:
| Why would it be any different with rented bare metal? I can
| just run my terraform script against any one and be up and
| running in less than 2 minutes.
| SergeAx wrote:
| You have to provision a new server first, preferably the
| same or better configuration. And then restore all backups,
| because probably all your components didn't scale beyond
| one server yet.
| jayski wrote:
| 100% agree.
|
| AWS is very cost efficient for other services (S3,SES,SQS, etc)
| but virtual machines are not a good deal. You get less RAM &
| CPU, with the virtualization overhead, and pay a lot more
| money.
|
| Especially for Postgres if you run some tests with pgbench you
| can really see the penalty you pay for virtualization.
|
| Maybe the sysadmin skill of being able to build your own
| infrastructure is becoming a lost art, otherwise I can't
| explain why people are so in love with paying 5x for less
| performance.
|
| Hetzner is cheap and reliable in Europe, if you're in North
| America take a look at OVH. Especially their cost-saving
| alternative called SoYouStart. You can get 4/8 4.5ghz, 64 RAM
| and an NVME drive for $65.
|
| (I have no affiliation with OVH, I'm just a customer with
| almost 100 servers, and it's worked out great for me)
| unity1001 wrote:
| > Hetzner is cheap and reliable in Europe
|
| Hetzner cloud now has two US locations... Still no US
| dedicated servers though - those would kick real ass. Even if
| their current cloud offerings themselves are already ~30% of
| the price of the major cloud equivalents...
| KyeRussell wrote:
| AWS's value proposition is dead simple to understand if
| you've actually used it. You said it yourself. AWS gets you
| through the door with their managed services, meta components
| (like billing and IAM), and whatever else. Saying even in a
| tongue in cheek way that people are in love with paying more
| for less raw power isn't giving people enough credit. I know
| I could get a better cost per hertz elsewhere, or whatever.
| That's not the whole equation.
| shanebellone wrote:
| I'm not sure if cloud has a valid value-proposition. The
| more I explore and build the more irrelevant it seems for
| the average developer. Besides price and performance being
| obvious concerns, it's also a platform. Working with it
| fundamentally ties your business to a set of products.
| Historically, this hasn't worked well for Internet
| businesses. Plus, all the benefits of cloud can be mirrored
| by traditional servers.
|
| Self-serve infrastructure appears likely to become
| increasingly viable as we continue improving last mile
| delivery and expand fiber access. Will cloud become self-
| cannibalizing? Definitely maybe.
| Stranger43 wrote:
| That could have been true if the industry had not screwed
| up IPv6 and security so badly that it's actually rare for
| even good internet connections to expose their end users
| to full inbound internet traffic so it's actually harder
| to self host out of your basement today then it was 20
| years ago because of the prevalence of ISP supplied
| hardware firewalls for todays consumer internet.
|
| What cloud gets you is the ability to put your
| data/workload right at the core without having to make
| special deals with your local isp, and with a lot more
| resilience then you would likely afford unless your at
| least at the multiple 20 foot container full of servers
| scale of compute need.
| shanebellone wrote:
| It's not an issue anymore. Your main concerns are power
| and internet stability. Plus, upload speed. The rest can
| be worked out.
|
| https://www.cloudflare.com/products/tunnel/
|
| https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflared
|
| https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-
| one/connections...
|
| Edit: If anyone is interested in self-hosting, it's
| stupid simple with cloudflared. I have a 2017 Google
| Pixelbook running Ubuntu on custom firmware that's
| serving a Flask-based website. It sits on my desk
| charging while connected to a guest wifi network. It
| receives a 100/100 Mobile PageSpeed score and takes 0.8
| seconds to fully load.
| matwood wrote:
| Yeah, raw compute is only one of many things I need to
| optimize for now. For many use cases compute is a solved
| problem. What I do think about is ease of backups,
| restores, ability for multi-region, scaling, deploys, then
| the many other services I don't need to build and maintain.
| If my problem was compute constrained then sure, back to
| metal. Or, if my business is so big I can handle the cost,
| yeah run my own DCs.
|
| I'll also note that I'm old hehe, and one of my first jobs
| we had a decent sized data center on site. Dealing with
| SANs, tape drives (auto tape rotators at the time were
| garbage), servers, etc... was a huge PITA. Packing up tapes
| and shipping them to another office for location redundancy
| was always fun.
| jayski wrote:
| I understand what you're saying. It might come down to
| use-case.
|
| The particular application I manage really suffers from
| low GHz and not having all data in memory. Ive run the
| benchmarks on EC2, certain reports that finish in ~5
| seconds can take more than a minute on a comparable EC2
| instance that costs about 10x as much. This application
| really needs the raw CPU. and yes we have a pretty large
| engineering team that has optimized all the queries,
| indices etc.
|
| As far as replication, backups, etc. I set all that up,
| and honestly it wasn't a big deal. It's a couple short
| chapters in the Postgres book that explain it all very
| simply, how to configure, continuously (and
| automatically) test, etc.
|
| I do agree that SANs are a nightmare. Thats why I ship
| all my WALs (PG backup files) to S3 (and eventually
| Glacier). That way I don't have to think about losing
| those files and it's dirt cheap.
|
| I think there's a misconception that these kinds of
| configurations are too complicated for a single engineer
| to setup, with never ending maintenance required. In
| reality you can set it all up in less than a week and it
| only really needs maintenance when you want to upgrade
| Postgres (some settings may have changed). I'd estimate
| it takes about 5 hours per year of maintenance.
| cpursley wrote:
| How much time is spent managing all of this monthly (deploys,
| etc)?
| bluehatbrit wrote:
| Not the parent commenter but I do basically the same as them.
| It really depends how much you're hosting and how much you
| want the latest updates. If I didn't want to do any updates
| to the selfhosted stuff I could probably spend 0 time a
| month. Most of the stuff I selfhost is only available over my
| VPN anyway so security isn't a huge concern on those.
|
| Even if I did want to update, it's just a case of pulling the
| latest version into the docker-compose template and re-
| running the ansible playbook. Obviously if the upgrade
| requires more then so be it, but it's no different to any
| other setup work wise.
|
| Probably the only thing I _need_ to do which I do manually is
| test my backups. But I have a script for each project which
| does it so I just SSH on, run the one-liner, check the result
| and it's done. I do that roughly once a month or so, but I
| also get emails if a backup fails.
|
| So it can be no time at all. Usually it's probably 1-2 hours
| a month if I'm taking updates on a semi-regular basis. But
| that will scale with the more things you host and manage.
| klodolph wrote:
| Hijacking this--what are the main options here? I found pricing
| for Hetzner and OVH dedicated / bare metal instances easily
| enough, but I found it a little difficult to find information
| about other providers.
| kumarvvr wrote:
| This absolutely works, but this comes at a later stage, perhaps
| after an MVP has picked up ground.
|
| For a beginner, the cheapest ones get the work done.
|
| I am sure that as cloud computing evolves, these offering
| become more common.
|
| There is another aspect of cloud computing. The medium to large
| corporates, count cloud computing as single digit percentages
| on their cost calculations. This means that the decisions taken
| by managers and teams, often search for reliability and
| scalability (to be put on their presentations) rather than "is
| my setup costly or cheap".
| FpUser wrote:
| >"I know it's not in fashion, but I will suggest that renting
| physical servers is a very good and under-appreciated
| compromise. "
|
| Exactly what I do for myself and my clients. Saves tons of
| dosh.
| cryptos wrote:
| In 2015 I worked in a project where really big servers (lots of
| RAM, fast SSDs) where needed for large database. The client had
| preferred AWS, but the monthly bill would have been something
| like 30K Euros. So, they went with Hetzner for a few hundred
| bucks a month ...
| sakopov wrote:
| That sounds like managed (RDS) instance pricing.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Virtual servers scale down better.
|
| Whatever you create, will start with 0 users, and an entire
| real machine is completely overkill for that 0 load you will
| get. You upgrade your VPS into a pair of real machines, then
| into a small rented cluster, and then into a datacenter (if
| somebody doesn't undercut that one). All of those have
| predictable bills and top performance for their price.
| BirAdam wrote:
| Modern server hardware can hit very low power states at idle
| just like modern desktops can. Most servers are also
| headless, so you're not wasting power on a GPU. This means
| that you're looking at a lower power bill if you're not doing
| much. Likewise, you usually pay most for egress, and at low
| traffic that's not much of an issue. Physical hardware can
| scale down exceedingly well. The main thing I would argue is
| that one own the hardware rather than rent.
| toast0 wrote:
| It's hard to scale down the cost to the range of $4/month.
| I've seen offers for rented dedicated severs in that price
| range, and it's Core2 and similar.
|
| Anything you own in a colo is going to be more per month
| too. When I had connections where I could pay for a static
| IP, that was usually $5/month.
|
| I'm now renting a pretty low end server, but it's
| $30/month. Way more everything that I need, but it's nice.
| And they didn't drop support for my OS while increasing
| prices to improve support or something. (Although I did
| have some initially flakey hardware that needed to get
| swapped)
| dm wrote:
| And with that computing power it's easy to install qemu-kvm and
| virtualise your own servers which is more scalable (and easier
| to move when the hardware you're renting becomes redundant)
| than having one or two monolithic servers with every
| conceivable piece of software installed, conflicting
| dependencies, etc.
|
| The biggest additional cost to this is renting more IPv4
| addresses, which Hetzner charge handsomely for now that there
| are so few available.
| hknmtt wrote:
| the cloud is the golden cage. companies, and people, got sold
| on comfort and ease of use whilst trapping themselves into
| vendor lock-in environment that is the california hotel. when
| they realize the problem, they are too deep in the tech and
| rewriting their codebase would be too complex or expensive so
| they bite the expense and keep on doing what they are doing.
| constantly increasing their dependency and costs and never be
| able to leave.
|
| as you pointed out, bare metal is the way to go. is works the
| opposite of cloud - a bit more work at the beginning but a way
| lot less of expenses at the end.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Usually the issue is that on-prem is seen as legacy and gets
| legacy budget and talent. Bigger companies are going to stick
| to a couple of big providers who don't sell/rent iron.
|
| My employer adopted cloud as a business/financial play, not a
| religious one. We often land new builds in the cloud and
| migrate to a data center if appropriate later.
|
| The apps on-prem cost about 40% less. Apps that are more cost
| effective in cloud stay there.
| sourcecodeplz wrote:
| But then again you have to monitor the health of the drives as
| opposed to a VPS.
| k8sToGo wrote:
| Not if you build a cluster with disposable nodes.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Ask in advance about who's responsible for hardware health
| monitoring, recommended tools for that, and how they handle
| hardware failures. Bonus - how they respond to such questions
| may separate the good providers of private rent-a-servers
| from the not-so-good ones.
| toast0 wrote:
| Who faces the immediate consequences of failed hardware ---
| that's who needs to monitor it.
|
| Disk monitoring isn't too hard though. For hard drives, run
| smartctl once an hour, alert when reallocated or pending
| sectors grows quickly or hits 100. For SSDs, cross your
| fingers; in my experience with a few thousand, they tend to
| work great until they disappear from the bus, never to be
| seen again. Have a data recovery plan that doesn't involve
| storage of the data onto the same model devices with very
| similar power on hours --- power on hour correlated
| firmware errors are real.
| nevi-me wrote:
| I was upset last week when I saw how much our managed Postgres
| service cost us at work. $800 for the month, it's storing
| around 32GB of data, and is allocated 4 CPU cores.
|
| Like you, I also run my services from a rented physical server.
| I used to use Versaweb, but their machines are too old. I
| didn't previously like Hetzner because I'd heard bad things
| about them interfering with what you're running. However, I
| moved to them in December when my Versaweb instance _just died_
| , probably SSD from old age. I'm now paying 50% of what I paid
| Versaweb, and I can run 6 such Postgres instances.
|
| Then it makes one wonder whether it's worth paying $700 of $800
| for a managed service with a fancy cloud UI, automatic upgrades
| and backups, etc. For a 1 person show or small startup, I think
| not. Cheaper to use an available service and dump backups to S3
| or something cheaper.
| dachryn wrote:
| for a startup, it might actually make more sense. Do you want
| to pay an engineer to setup the backups and monthly update
| cycle? Setup the alert monitoring?
|
| There is an implicit cost there. If its only one or two of
| those things, just take the managed services.
|
| If you start to scale, get an administrator type of employee
| to save on this
| dagw wrote:
| _$800 for the month, it 's storing around 32GB of data, and
| is allocated 4 CPU cores._
|
| Company I used to work for happily paid company A four times
| what company B charged for the exact same service, just
| because company A was willing to send quarterly invoices in
| way that played nicely with our invoicing system. For
| companies, saving a few hundred bucks here and there often
| isn't worth the hassles of introducing any extra friction.
| swalsh wrote:
| I pointed out a difference like that once to the CTO, who
| then proceeded to show me the financials for the service.
| We were making something like a hundred thousand dollars a
| month from it (i had no idea, seemed like we only had a few
| clients... but they paid A LOT). $400 wasn't worth spending
| time thinking about. Especially if it might cause downtime.
| klodolph wrote:
| I've come to the same conclusion. Whenever I've looked at
| managed database pricing, I've always wanted to just do the
| management myself and just rent the underlying computation
| and storage.
|
| I think even for larger teams it may make sense to manage
| databases yourself, assuming you have the competence to do it
| well. There are so many things that can go wrong with managed
| services and they don't hide the underlying implementation
| the way that things like block storage or object storage do.
| neilv wrote:
| Managed PostgreSQL seemed worthwhile for an early startup
| that couldn't afford to lose an hour of production data.
|
| Otherwise, I'd have to hire/contract someone very
| experienced, or dedicate a solid month or more of my time
| (which was not available), just to be 100% sure we could
| always restore journaled PITR backups quickly.
|
| I can save orders of magnitude on cloud costs other places,
| but credible managed PostgreSQL was a pretty easy call (even
| if the entry-level price tag was more than you'd expect).
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Why is postgres particularly overpriced in clouds?
| chazeon wrote:
| I would suspect it's because of memory. I remember years
| ago my cheap 512m mem vps is easily bottlenecked by pg's
| memory usage. CPU is idle when idled, memory eat by pg does
| not get released. Scaling memory is not cheap. Memory is
| the "scarce" for cloud hosting.
| margorczynski wrote:
| Probably complexity + usually the most important data is
| there so companies are willing to pay the extra to have
| peace of mind
| danjac wrote:
| Hetzner is excellent value of money, especially if you are
| based in Europe.
| kouteiheika wrote:
| It can actually be an even better value if you are _not_
| based in Europe, because for certain countries they don 't
| charge you VAT, so you effectively get everything ~20%
| cheaper.
| andrejuseu wrote:
| EU countries that has VAT codes pay 0% VAT from other EU
| countries with VAT codes.
|
| More info
| https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/taxation/vat/cross-
| bor...
| antisceptic wrote:
| How many nodes (droplets) do you spin up that you need
| Terraform? I do something similar but I use a single script to
| spin up the Digital Ocean side and then I complete the setup in
| Ansible (with an all-in-one master script, since the DO
| droplets are fetched with a handmade inventory plugin).
| zer0tonin wrote:
| I actually agree with you, it's just a little bit more
| expensive. An under-appreciated thing with dedicated servers is
| that they often come with very solid network bandwith, which
| really helps for use cases like streaming audio/video.
| phpnode wrote:
| I really don't understand why the industry seems to have lost
| sight of this. It's really common to see super complicated,
| incredibly expensive, but highly scalable cloud deployments for
| problems that can be trivially solved with one or two dedicated
| servers. Even the mere suggestion of renting a dedicated server
| provokes scorn from devops teams. The overall difference in
| cost when taking into account all of the complexity, feature-
| lag and general ceremony must be at least 10x and maybe even
| closer to 100x. It's madness.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| The allure of our industry to mime FAANG leaders might be one
| of the reasons we're at this stage. Most products could be
| safely run on simpler setups.
|
| I suspect that VendorOps and complex tools like kubernetes
| are favored by complexity merchants which have arisen in the
| past decade. It looks great on resume and gives tech leaders
| a false sense of achievement.
|
| Meanwhile Stackoverflow, which is arguably more important
| than most startups, is chugging along on dedicated machines.
|
| 1: https://stackoverflow.blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-
| arc...
| dgb23 wrote:
| Software development and related things are known to have
| fantastic often free online resources for autodidacts.
|
| It seems like the trend in this space is to jump directly
| to the highest layer of abstraction. Skipping the
| fundamentals and point to $buzzword tools, libraries and
| products.
|
| You see glimpses of this in different forms. One is social
| media threads which ask stuff like "How much of X do I need
| to know to learn Y?" Where X is a fundamental, possibly
| very stable technology or field and Y is some tool du jour
| or straight up a product or service.
| Akronymus wrote:
| > but highly scalable
|
| IME aiming for scalability is exceedingly wrong for most
| services/applications/whatever. And usually you pay so much
| overhead for the "scalable" solutions, that you then need to
| scale to make up for it.
| cameronh90 wrote:
| If you're ever trying to get big enterprise contracts, the
| kind of scalability, compliance and disaster recovery that
| providers like AWS/Azure enable are now just table stakes.
|
| Sure, you can get something working on Hetzner but be
| prepared to answer a lot more questions.
| axelthegerman wrote:
| Yes fair point though I doubt some of these super
| distributed, scalable apps are able to properly execute a
| disaster recovery... And just because all the serverless
| components scale "infinitely" doesn't mean the patchwork
| stitching them together is.
|
| Agreed on your last point of enterprise asking for this
| which again is just sad that these business "requirements"
| dictate how to architect and host your software when
| another way might be the much better one
| jgalt212 wrote:
| > Even the mere suggestion of renting a dedicated server
| provokes scorn from devops teams.
|
| Because it's a threat to their jobs.
| raducu wrote:
| Anybody tried mixing cloud + self hosted k8s on hetzner or is
| it too complicated to do?
| icedchai wrote:
| You'd probably have some latency issues, plus waste a ton
| of $$$ on the bandwidth egress fees.
| codegeek wrote:
| Because cloud is the new "No one gets fired for using IBM".
| If you are using dedicated servers somewhere, you cannot have
| the same reputation of say Using AWS for cloud. Everyone
| knows the AWSs, Google Cloud etc and no one gets fired for
| selecting/using them.
|
| I personally have run Dedicated Servers for our business in
| the earlier days but as we expanded and scaled, it became a
| lot easier to go with the Cloud providers to provision
| various services quickly even though the costs went up. Not
| to mention it is a lot easier to tell a prospective customer
| that you use "cloud like AWS" than "Oh we rent these machines
| in a data center run by some company" (which can actually be
| better but customers mostly wont get that). Audit, Compliance
| and others.
| l5870uoo9y wrote:
| > trivially solved with one or two dedicated servers...
|
| For many even lot less than that. I run a small side
| project[1] that went viral a few times (30K views in 24 hours
| or so) and it is running on a single core CPU web server and
| a managed Postgres likewise on a single CPU core. It hasn't
| even been close to full utilization.
|
| 1: https://aihelperbot.com/
| tstrimple wrote:
| I feel like many people use the cloud "wrong". If you're just
| standing up VMs then yeah, it's going to be slower and more
| expensive than renting a physical server. If you're just
| going to setup VMs and pretend you're still on-prem you're
| better off not switching. But I've got projects setup on PaaS
| services that literally cost a few bucks a month because it's
| only charging me for actual use and not idle time. I've got
| some small customers (tens of thousands of users) who I've
| helped move into the cloud who see the same thing. They have
| SPA websites backed by lambda functions and on-demand
| databases. If their website isn't being hit, it's not costing
| them anything at all. The only lock-in is the boiler plate
| code around the lambda activation which could be switched
| fairly easily to target any Functions as a Service platform.
| woadwarrior01 wrote:
| I'm curious to know what on-demand databases do you use
| with AWS Lambdas? Two options that I've evaluated are:
| Aurora Serverless v2, which isn't quite serverless in
| practice and DynamoDB. And the mental model for DynamoDB
| very different from that of traditional SQL databases.
| tstrimple wrote:
| I'm actually primarily building on Azure with Cosmos DB.
| The mental model is very different, but I think important
| if you want to build cheap cloud services. I think that's
| the larger point. You have to think about doing things
| differently in the cloud otherwise you're just deploying
| and managing VMs as if you were on-prem albeit with more
| scaling control. It feels like everyone who is
| complaining about how expensive cloud hosting is go into
| it thinking it's just someone else hosting the VMs where
| as a VM is the option of last resort for me.
| alex7734 wrote:
| In addition to what has already been said in the other
| comments, devs have an incentive to push cloud tech against
| the interest of their employers so they can put the
| experience in their resume, since cloud tech is seen as more
| specialized and in higher regard and as such a dev
| experienced in it commands a higher salary.
|
| Plus who doesn't want to play with the newest, coolest toy on
| another's dime?
| kbrannigan wrote:
| RDD or Resume Driven Development
| rqtwteye wrote:
| Realistically RDD is a very sane strategy for employees.
| When I read my company's job ads a few years ago I had
| serious doubts if I would get hired by them because my
| resume didn't have the buzzwords they wanted. Since then
| I always sprinkle in some new tech with each new project,
| not because it makes sense for the company, but for my
| resume and future employability.
| corford wrote:
| In my experience it's often the other way around.
| CTO/mgmt/HR would rather swallow the perf/cost hit of Cloud
| because it makes auditing, compliance, support, dr,
| security, training and hiring easier. Not to mention it
| usually provides much more flexibility during the PMF stage
| of a startup (where product roadmap, team talent/bandwidth
| and execution speed are often much more important drivers
| than the raw perf/cost ratio of your infra).
|
| There's definitely an argument to move (some) stuff off
| cloud later in the journey when flexibility (or dealing
| with flux/pivoting) becomes less of a primary driver and
| scale/cost start dominating.
| margorczynski wrote:
| "It's insane not to start your startup on the Cloud and
| even more so to stay on it" paraphrasing something I
| think I've read on HN some time ago. But I agree, it's
| best to treat the Cloud as an intermediate solution and
| once you stabilize and a clearer picture about
| requirements is available move at least partially to on-
| prem (especially the more expensive stuff like compute,
| storage is I think fine)
| yolo3000 wrote:
| I wonder if there is any honest research into the TCO of
| cloud vs on-prem. In my team we pay ~100k/month for gcp,
| management doesn't seem to care, since the whole company is
| on gcp. But they also didn't care when it was on prem and
| was using hundreds of servers.
| dpweb wrote:
| Its big companies - their priorities are different. Saving a
| couple million dollars isn't worth the tradeoff of not being
| industry standrd (AWS, Google, MS). They hire tech consulting
| companies who sell their product, large deployments.
| Slartie wrote:
| "No one ever got fired for buying AWS"
| itomato wrote:
| I just want to go back to leasing an always-available Opteron
| with optional remote hands.
| avereveard wrote:
| if you need durability in the cloud you just pick any object
| storage service from the 3 bigs, and a db with multiple
| deployment with automatic replication and managed failover.
|
| getting the equivalent reliability with irons is a lot more
| expensive than renting "two dedicated servers" - now you
| might be fine with one server and a backup solution, and
| that's fair. but a sysad to create all that, even on a short
| contract for the initial setup and no maintenance, is going
| to go well beyond the cloud price difference, especially if
| there's a database in the mix and you care about that data.
| phpnode wrote:
| I'm not saying there's no place for cloud, but that many
| workloads benefit from using dedicated hardware. It is
| often much simpler to deploy to a dedicated server rather
| than spending months rearchitecting your system (or even
| worse, cutting customer facing features!) to efficiently
| make use of many small cloud instances.
| jerf wrote:
| I am responsible for about 10-12 t3.medium-class servers
| (number includes redundant servers) and the services running
| on them. All of them are fairly overprovisioned for what they
| are, excepting that the monitoring system we use on them for
| some reason likes to consume about half-a-gig of RAM so I
| can't run on even smaller servers. I write my services in Go,
| so the CPU isn't sitting there spending 98% of its time
| chasing pointers and can use multiple CPUs as needed for its
| heavy-hitting tasks. It's a rough day for those servers when
| they pass 5% average CPU for the day.
|
| Could I switch some of them to lambda functions? Or switch to
| ECS? Or switch to some other cloud service du jour? Maybe.
| But the amount of time I spent writing this comment is
| already about six month's worth of savings for such a switch.
| If it's any more difficult than "push button, receive 100%
| reliably-translated service", it's hard to justify.
|
| Some of this is also because the cloud does provide some
| other services now that enable this sort of thing. I don't
| need to run a Kafka cluster for basic messaging, they all
| come with a message bus. I use that. I use the hosted DB
| options. I use S3 or equivalent, etc. I find what's left over
| is almost hardly worth the hassle of trying to jam myself
| into some other paradigm when I'm paying single-digit dollars
| a month to just run on an EC2 instance.
|
| It is absolutely the case that not everyone or every project
| can do this. I'm not stuck to this as an end-goal. When it
| doesn't work I immediately take appropriate scaling action.
| I'm not suggesting that you go rearchitect anything based on
| this. I'm just saying, it's not an option to be despised. It
| has a lot of flexibility in it, and the billing is quite
| consistent (or, to put it another way, the fact that if I
| suddenly have 50x the traffic, my system starts choking and
| sputtering noticeably rather than simply charging me hundreds
| of dollars more is a _feature_ to me rather than a bug), and
| you are generally not stretching yourself to contort into
| some paradigm that is convenient for some cloud service but
| may not be convenient for _you_.
| sinenomine wrote:
| > Even the mere suggestion of renting a dedicated server
| provokes scorn from devops teams.
|
| There is a method to the madness, here it is called "job-
| security-driven development".
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Growth hides sins. I ran a large self-funded enterprise
| service at a loss for 4-5 years, which is possible if you are
| growing 30%.
|
| Today, cloud is similar - the time to market is quicker as
| there are less moving parts. When the economy tanks and
| growth slows, the beancounters come in and do their thing.
|
| It happens every time.
| znpy wrote:
| > Even the mere suggestion of renting a dedicated server
| provokes scorn from devops teams.
|
| Have you ever had to manage one of those environments?
|
| The thing is, if you want to get some basic more-than-one-
| person scalability and proper devops then you have to
| overprovision by a significant factor (possibly voiding your
| savings).
|
| You're inevitably going to end up with a bespoke solution,
| which means new joiners will have a harder time getting
| mastery of the system and significant people leaving the
| company will bring their intimate knowledge of your
| infrastructure with them. You're back to pets instead of
| cattles. Some servers are special, after a while automation
| means "a lot of glue shell scripts here and there" and an OS
| upgrade means either half infra is KO for a while or you
| don't do OS upgrades at all.
|
| And in the fortunate case you need to scale up... You might
| find unpleasant surprises.
|
| And don't ever get me started on the networking side. Unless
| you're renting your whole rack and placing your own
| networking hardware, you get what you get. Which could be
| very poor in either functionalities or performances...
| Assuming you're not doing anything fancy.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > The thing is, if you want to get some basic more-than-
| one-person scalability and proper devops then you have to
| overprovision by a significant factor
|
| If you want 100.0000% uptime, sure. But you don't usually.
| The companies that want that kind of uptime normally has
| teams dedicated to it anyway.
|
| And scaling works well on bare-metal too if you scale
| vertically - have you _any_ idea the amount of power and
| throughput you can get from a single server?
|
| It's concerning to keep hearing about "scaling" when the
| speaker means "horizontal scaling".
|
| If you requirements are "scaling", then vertical scaling
| will take you far.
|
| If your requirements are "horizontal scaling on demand",
| then, sure, cloud providers will help there. But, TBH, few
| places need that sort of scaling.
| baq wrote:
| Just getting a highly available storage with any kind of
| performance requires you to overprovision by something
| like 12x (3 boxes with raid 1+0) which is frankly insane.
| And then you have to manage it and fix it when it
| inevitably breaks. The team who's supposed to do that
| will be swamped by trying to keep the other 15
| infrastructure services running and upgraded to a version
| which is only barely out of vendor support.
| adrianmsmith wrote:
| I think it might be due to the incentives - the costs are
| borne by the company (thus irrelevant to the employee),
| however putting new cool technologies on their CV is very
| relevant to the employee.
| rr888 wrote:
| Agreed. I love our physical in house servers, but not
| knowing AWS in depth really hurt my last job search.
| adrianmsmith wrote:
| Yeah that's the problem. It's not just a "devs are
| idiots, they should think of their company and not be
| obsessed with their CV" - not having worked with the
| latest trendy tech has a very real cost for developers.
|
| (As does being a consultant wanting an extension and
| writing software that works, as I found out the hard
| way.)
| bell-cot wrote:
| > ...company...employee...
|
| Yes - but stupid yearnings to "do what all the cool kids
| are doing now" are at least as strong in those who would
| normally be referred to as "managers", vs. "employees".
| adrianmsmith wrote:
| Good point - and in the case of managers there's also the
| "nobody got fired for buying IBM" effect:
|
| outcome A) huge microservices/cloud spend goes wrong,
| well at least you were following best practices, these
| things happen, what can you do.
|
| outcome B) you went with a Hetzner server and something
| went wrong, well you are a fool and should have gone with
| microservices, enjoy looking for a new job.
|
| Thus encouraging managers to choose microservices/cloud.
| It might not be the right decision for the company, but
| it's the right decision for the manager, and it's the
| manager making the decision.
| swatcoder wrote:
| The industry lost sight of a lot of things.
|
| We went through a growth boom, and like all of them before,
| it meant there were lots of inexperienced people being handed
| lots of money and urgent expectations. It's a recipe for
| cargo culting and exploitative marketing.
|
| But growth is slowing and money is getting more expensive, so
| we'll slow down and start to re-learn the old lessons with
| exciting new variations. (Like Here: managing bare metal
| scaling and with containers and orchestration)
|
| And the whole cycle will repeat in the next boom. That's our
| industry for now.
| [deleted]
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| > I really don't understand why the industry seems to have
| lost sight of this.
|
| There's a disconnect between founders and everyone else.
|
| Founders believe they're going to >10x every year.
|
| Reality is that they're 90% likely to fail.
|
| 90% of the time - you're fine failing on whatever.
|
| Some % of the 10% of the time you succeed you're still fine
| without the cloud - at least for several years of success,
| plenty of time to switch _if_ ever necessary.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Even if you 10x every year, going from year 1 to year 2 you
| switch from renting two 6-core servers to renting two 64
| core servers, in year 3 you rent 20 servers, in year 4 you
| are renting a small room of racks in a colo space and add a
| server every other day (or you continue renting servers, if
| that's your style). Out of all the problems that arise from
| 10x-ing your organisation every year, this is a really
| minor one.
| ipaddr wrote:
| The fear.. I'll need 20 servers in 3 years.. the reality:
| A 4 dollar vps is powerful enough until you hit millions
| and millions of customers.
| l5870uoo9y wrote:
| would prefer to spend 20-30-50 USD and get a managed
| deployment infrastructure with rollback, blue/green
| deployment, github integration and so. this setup can
| last a long time.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| And all that to host what could be served by Hugo static
| site.
| mring33621 wrote:
| I'd pay good money if you could truly teach me how to do
| that for recurring costs within a factor of 2 from cheap
| rental vps/box.
| criley2 wrote:
| I'll be the counter opinion for this. Let's say you're
| Sprocket Masters, and you have to run two front ends (a
| Sprocket Sales site and a Sprocket Repair site) and a backend
| connecting them. But ultimately your sprockets are made in
| your factory on-site, and the majority of your staff is
| related to the manufacture of sprockets.
|
| You're not a software company, fundamentally you make and
| sell Sprockets.
|
| The opinions here would be hire a big eng/IT staff to "buy
| and maintain servers" (PaaS is bad) and then likely "write a
| bunch of code yourself" (SaaS is bad) or whatever is
| currently popular here (last thread here it was "Pushing PHP
| over SFTP without Git, and you're silly if you need more"
| lol)
|
| But I believe businesses should do One Thing Well and avoid
| trying to compete (doing it manually) for things outside of
| their core competency. In this case, I would definitely think
| Sprocket Masters should not attempt to manage their own
| hardware and should rely on a provider to handle scaling,
| security, uptime, compliance, and all the little details. I
| also think their software should be bog-standard with as
| little in-house as possible. They're not a software shop and
| should be writing as little code as possible.
|
| Realistically Widget Masters could run these sites with a
| rather small staff unless they decided to do it all manually,
| in which case they'd probably need a lot larger staff.
| ezconnect wrote:
| When the web was starting, that was the hardest sell to
| companies. They don't want to worry about those technical
| staff they just want a website/ecommerce working and not
| putting too much resource on it. Then social media happens
| and those sites just became status symbols or just to
| retain the email address.
| lukeramsden wrote:
| You still have to do all that with cloud though - instead
| of firewalls and IP tables it's VPCs, IAM, security groups,
| auto scaling groups, etc etc. The reason I think it's still
| probably better for Sprocket Masters to go cloud is purely
| because those skills are easier to hire for.
| arp242 wrote:
| The core business for Sprocket Masters isn't really tech
| stuff: it's making sprockets. For those kind of businesses
| it makes a lot of sense; the tech stuff is required, but
| only in the sane sense that a phone line or electricity is.
|
| However, what I _also_ see - and what I think the previous
| poster was talking about - are businesses where tech _is_
| at the core of the business, and there it often makes less
| sense, and instead of saving time it seems to _cost_ time.
| There 's a reason there are AWS experts: it's not trivial.
| "Real" servers also aren't trivial, but also not
| necessarily harder than cloud services.
| justeleblanc wrote:
| "Tech" isn't a thing. If I ran a company that produced
| CAD software, I would work in "tech", but I would have no
| reason to believe that my competency in writing CAD
| software should translate to competency in maintaining
| web servers or network infrastructure.
| dan1234 wrote:
| Sounds like Sprocket Masters should really outsource their
| two sites to a an agency that specialises in maintaining
| such solutions for SMEs, then they wouldn't need to concern
| themselves with the nitty gritty of
| hosting/backups/security/updates etc...
| tsgagnon wrote:
| _Sounds like Sprocket Masters should really outsource
| their two sites to a an agency that specialises in
| maintaining such solutions for SMEs..._
|
| But those agencies don't want to have to staff for
| maintaining physical hardware either...
| phpnode wrote:
| it's not all or nothing. There's plenty of cases where
| using AWS or similar makes sense, but using the cloud for
| absolutely everything has a bunch of costs, both visible
| and invisible. Nuance and taste are the hardest things to
| teach, and these are in short supply in many engineering
| orgs.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > . In this case, I would definitely think Sprocket Masters
| should not attempt to manage their own hardware and should
| rely on a provider to handle scaling, security, uptime,
| compliance, and all the little details.
|
| But Sprocket Masters _still_ has to have an expensive Cloud
| Consultant on retainer simply to respond to emergencies.
|
| If you're going to have someone on staff to deal with the
| cloud issues, you may as well rent a server instead.
| mariusmg wrote:
| >I really don't understand why the industry seems to have
| lost sight of this.
|
| Because the industry is full of people who are chasing trends
| and keywords and to which the most important thing is to add
| those keywords to the CVs.
| 7952 wrote:
| It feels like artificial scarcity similar to what you see in
| high fixed cost monopolies. And that is exactly what most
| corporate IT departments are.
| esskay wrote:
| A lot of its the buzz. 'Cloud Hosting' is something everyone
| thinks they need, despite not grasping why, or that the
| chances are they arent getting cloud hosting at all, just a
| VPS.
|
| A solid dedicated server is 99% of the time far more useful
| than a crippled VPS on shared hardware but it obviously comes
| at an increased cost if you dont need all the resources they
| provide.
| slt2021 wrote:
| the most funny thing is that cloud engineering teams have no
| problem of using EC2 hosts, but somehow don't want to rent
| dedicated servers/VPC from regular datacenter companies.
|
| This only makes AWS richer at the expense of companies and
| cloud teams
| barbazoo wrote:
| As a developer I appreciate the compartmentalization, being
| able to make truly isolated changes. This is something that's
| not trivial for lots of folks, me included. I guess if one
| has the expertise in house to manage a K8s cluster on a raw
| machine, that'd be an option but I, personally, am not gonna
| touch that with a ten foot pole. So yeah with a big and
| capable enough infrastructure team that complexity could be
| abstracted away but in reality I (where I've worked) haven't
| seen that yet.
| xnx wrote:
| devops people want things to be expensive and complicated to
| justify their salaries
| k8sToGo wrote:
| Nice generalization.
|
| So far I haven't noticed that if I spend more for the
| company that I also get paid more.
| DrBenCarson wrote:
| Remember how Twitter lost 80% of its staff and still kept
| running?
| baq wrote:
| And Twitter ceo turned his account private because they
| can't figure out what the algorithm does
| dsr_ wrote:
| Anybody with experience on the ops side of that is
| absolutely in favor of simple and easy to understand -- and
| that often gets you cheap as a side effect.
|
| Source: almost thirty years of ops.
| sshine wrote:
| Having talked to AWS evangelists, it seems that they truly
| believe it cuts costs. In their reality this is true,
| because an alternative with the same guarantees and risk
| costs more. The implicit disagreement is that you often
| don't need all those guarantees.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > because an alternative with the same guarantees and
| risk costs more
|
| I really doubt this. The one theme you see on almost
| every AWS proponent is some high amount of delusion about
| what guarantees AWS actually provides you.
| gmac wrote:
| Hmm. I guess there's guarantees that _it won 't happen_,
| and guarantees that _if it happens then it wasn 't
| supposed to and can't be your fault_, and the latter may
| still be pretty attractive to some decision-makers.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > if it happens then it wasn't supposed to and can't be
| your fault
|
| Yeah, sure. Nobody gets fired for buying from IBM.
|
| Well, if large companies had any competence in decision-
| making, they would be unbeatable and it would be hopeless
| to work on anything else at all. So, yeah, that's a
| public good.
| dagw wrote:
| In my experience those devops people where hired and
| empowered by senior managers to make things expensive and
| complicate because the company is 'enterprise' and has to
| follow "industry best practices"
| macNchz wrote:
| The dedicated server deployments I worked on at smallish
| software companies 10+ years ago wound up being really
| annoying. I enjoy sysadmin type stuff and this idea has
| tempted me, but I think it's a false economy in most cases.
|
| The incremental cost of being on a cloud is totally worth it
| to me to have managed databases, automatic snapshots, hosted
| load balancers, plug and play block storage etc.
|
| I want to worry about whether our product is good, not about
| middle of the night hardware failures, spinning up a new
| server and having it not work right because there was no
| incentive to use configuration management with a single box,
| having a single runaway task cause OOM or full disk and break
| _everything_ instead of just that task's VM, fear of
| restarting a machine that has been up 1000 days etc.
| neeleshs wrote:
| 100%. There are definitely cases where managing your own
| dedicated server infra (not hardware, just the software
| part) makes sense.
|
| For me, the allure of the cloud is not some FAANG
| scalability fad when its not required, but automatic OS
| patching, automatic load balancing, NAT services,
| centralized, analyzable logs, database services that I
| don't have to manage, out of the box rolling upgrades to
| services, managing crypto-keys and secrets, and of course,
| object storage. (These are all the things we use in our
| startup)
|
| I'd go on a limb and say dedicated servers may be very
| viable/cost effective when we reach a certain scale,
| instead of the other way round. For the moment, the cloud
| expenses are worth it for my startup.
| wongarsu wrote:
| I think there's a lot of room to bring the best of both
| worlds together. Some are moving on this already, for
| example Hetzner Cloud load balancers can also have
| dedicated servers as targets.
| [deleted]
| chillfox wrote:
| The key is to use some kind of config management, even for
| a single box. The problem you need to solve is basically to
| separate your configurations from the system default and
| make it easy to bring the system into a known good state.
| p_j_w wrote:
| This is now eating into the cost savings over a cloud
| deployment.
| speedgoose wrote:
| But most cloud deployments have config management too.
| Using Ansible/Terraform/Kubernetes on bare metal isn't
| much different than using Ansible/Terraform/Kubernetes in
| the cloud.
| doesnt_know wrote:
| How so? You should still be doing those things with cloud
| deployment anyway. The alternative is (the pretty
| terribly named) "click ops" where devops folks have to
| fiddle with some cloud UI settings to make production
| changes or go through wizards to attempt to replicate an
| environment.
|
| If you are doing your environment config as code it
| ultimately shouldn't matter if your target is a dedicated
| server, a vm or some cloud specific setup configured via
| an api.
| regularfry wrote:
| I do think there's something in there about the immediacy
| of a replacement if a currently-live box falls over.
| Rough rule of thumb says it's hours for a physical box,
| minutes for a VM, seconds for a k8s container, a
| hopefully smaller number of seconds for a serverless cold
| start. Each of those has ergonomics different enough that
| it might matter even with config management that rhymes
| across the options.
| miah_ wrote:
| We should design a protocol that bootstraps newly booted
| systems via some protocol.. We could call it the
| Bootstrap Protocol, or bootp for short...
| antihero wrote:
| What about simply running k8s on metal? You wouldn't be
| able to auto-scale (unless you automated buying and selling
| the hardware provision from the DS) but it would be nice.
| foepys wrote:
| You can still auto-scale. Use dedicated servers for your
| base load and when sudden demand arises, switch to a
| cloud provider juggling VMs.
| tstrimple wrote:
| Then you have to manage k8s, and based on the number of
| companies I've helped move away from that model (to PaaS
| mostly) it's no fun either.
| code_biologist wrote:
| What PaaS providers / platforms do you like? I want to
| move some personal shell scripted boxes to PaaS, but
| dropped the idea with the decline of Heroku. Tried Dokku
| and struggled, but it seems like I should give it another
| try.
| geektips wrote:
| Maybe try coolify[0] its provides a better than dokku in
| my personal experience.
|
| 0. https://coolify.io/
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Anything of note between the two which you found
| favorable? I am early-days into designing a Dokku backed
| system. Dokku has a lot going for it that makes it
| appealing to me, but happy to learn what I am missing.
| password4321 wrote:
| I need ARM, is this still the right choice? Nothing is
| coming up when I hit the site.
| josegonzalez wrote:
| Maintainer of Dokku here:
|
| I'd love if you jumped into our Discord/Slack and brought
| up some of the issues you were seeing so we can at least
| make the experience better for others using Dokku. Feel
| free to hit me up there (my nick is `savant`).
| tstrimple wrote:
| I'm in a weird position where I work with both extremely
| large enterprises and very small startups and not much in
| between. The enterprises in my area lean towards Azure so
| it's still my cloud provider of choice. I haven't had
| occasion to look for PaaS providers outside of the major
| cloud vendors yet. On the startup side, most of these
| companies want to be cloud first so it's much easier to
| start them the right way and avoid the legacy mess that
| most enterprises deal with today.
| [deleted]
| thegeomaster wrote:
| > The incremental cost of being on a cloud is totally worth
| it to me to have managed databases, automatic snapshots,
| hosted load balancers, plug and play block storage etc.
|
| Hetzner has all of this except managed databases.
| exsysadmin wrote:
| On their managed servers you can install data bases via
| KonsoleH and they manage it. (Never used the managed
| servers myself. MySQL and PostgreSQL?)
|
| https://www.hetzner.com/managed-server
|
| The webhosting packages also include 1..unlimited DBs
| (MySQL and PostgreSQL)
|
| https://www.hetzner.com/webhosting/
| riku_iki wrote:
| > install data bases
|
| does it have automatic backup and fail over?
| twic wrote:
| Looks like it has backups, to an extent [1]:
|
| > With booked daily backup or the backup included in the
| type of server, all data is backed up daily and retained
| for a maximum of 14 days. Recovery of backups (Restore)
| is possible via the konsoleH administration interface.
|
| But i get the impression that the databases on managed
| servers are intended for use by apps running on that
| server, so there isn't really a concept of failover.
|
| https://www.hetzner.com/legal/managed-server/
| riku_iki wrote:
| which is most complicated part.
| jabart wrote:
| EC2 or on-premise you need monitoring to detect issues
| before they become issues.
|
| A single drive on a single server failing should never
| cause a production outage.
|
| A lot of configuration issues can be tracked down to self-
| contained deployments. Does that font file or JRE really
| need to be installed on the whole server or can you bundle
| it into your deployment.
|
| Our deployments use on-premise and EC2 targets. The
| deployment script isn't different, only the IP for the host
| is.
|
| Now, I will say if I can use S3 for something I 100% will.
| There is not an on-premise alternative for it with the same
| feature set.
| orangepurple wrote:
| Fine, but RAID-Z2 in a dedicated server is good enough or
| overkill for most people and it's free.
| jabart wrote:
| HackerNews went down because two SSDs in a mirror went
| down at the same time. This was due to a hours on SSD
| bug. While Raid-Z2 works, and provides great reliability,
| two-servers replicated, both with raid-z2 and a nightly
| offsite backup and as long as you are testing your
| backups it's a solid plan.
| bsder wrote:
| And AWS goes down about once a year because US-East-1 has
| some weird failure. Your point?
|
| The point of DevOps is "Cattle, not pets." Put a bullet
| in your server once a week to find your failure points.
| pas wrote:
| Aaand that's why k8s seems like a good step in the right
| direction. It has all - okay, absolutely not all, but a
| good number of the important ones - of these concepts
| "built-in".
|
| Sure, the actual pile of Go(o) that drives it can be
| improved (and it is indeed improving).
|
| That said, the hard truth is that your approach is the
| correct one, almost all businesses (startups!) overbuild
| instead of focusing on providing value, identifying the
| actual niche, etc. (Yes, there's also the demand side of
| this, as the VC money inflated startups overbuild they want
| to depend on 3rd parties that can take the load, scale with
| them, SLAs and whatnot must be advertised.)
| wkat4242 wrote:
| I don't agree, Ansible would be a much saner approach for
| a few dedicated boxes than k8s
| riku_iki wrote:
| What about deploying prebuilt docker image on dedicated
| server?
| allarm wrote:
| What about it? It can be easily done with Ansible. I
| managed a distributed infra with containers orchestrated
| by Ansible, worked fine.
| riku_iki wrote:
| it would be much less moving/fragile parts in prod. I am
| not an expert in this topic, and trying to learn about
| different approaches.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| This amazing playbook spins up a ton of dockers:
|
| https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-
| deploy
| alex_sf wrote:
| k8s is almost the polar opposite of this idea for most
| companies. At minimum, a half dozen daemons spread across
| multiple hosts for.. what? Making the easy things built-
| in and everything else much more complex than it needs to
| be?
| kakoni wrote:
| And those daemons use constantly 25-30%
| CPU.https://github.com/k3s-io/k3s/issues/294
| scarface74 wrote:
| And then you have to deal with the complexities of K8s...
| goneri wrote:
| If you've got your configuration properly automated,
| nothing prevent you from redeploying your bare-metal nodes
| every weeks. The opposite can actually also be true, it may
| become risky at some point to reboot a VM with a high
| uptime.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| This here is the trick. I like to do blue/green
| deployments. This workflow forces you to script (and
| implicitly test ) the full server+application deployment.
| With everything scripted, it just becomes a matter of
| deciding to rebuild a new machine every
| week/month/n-deploys which makes you comfortable. Plus,
| you get a hot spare for free.
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| I'm completely clueless about any server administration
| beyond a LAMP stack on a single machine serving a few
| dozen people
|
| I always hear about all the great stuff you get
| practically for free from cloud providers. Is that stuff
| actually that easy to set up and use? Any time I tried to
| set up my LAMP stack on a cloud service it was such a
| confusing and frightening process that I ended up giving
| up. I'm wondering if I just need to push a little harder
| and I'll get to Cloud Heaven
| z3t4 wrote:
| a bash script that auto installs everything will do. It
| has to be maintained though. You also lock down and
| harden the server. Running a stable OS helps.
| viraptor wrote:
| It's a mixed bag. It's more standardised, so once you
| know how to set up one app, you can mostly just repeat it
| multiple times as needed. Even for custom things, I can't
| remember the last time I started a CloudFormation stack
| from scratch - it's mostly copy&customise.
|
| Being able to say "I want a clustered MySQL here with
| this kind of specs" is much better (time-wise) than doing
| it on your own. The updates are also nicely wrapped up in
| the system, so I'm just saying "apply the latest update"
| rather than manually ensuring failovers/restarts happen
| in the right order.
|
| So you pay to simplify things, but the gain from that
| simplification only kicks in with larger projects. If you
| have something in a single server that you can restart
| while your users get an error page, it may not be worth
| it.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| I think the problem is configuration. Every thing that
| has its own configuration is basically a new language you
| must be able to speak perfectly. Configuration languages
| are not statically typed so when you make an error it
| typically does not tell you you made a mistake, and
| where, and thy it is a mistake.
|
| With Cloud stuff you have more configuration to do
| because it is about configuring virtual servers etc.
| Instead of carrying the PC in a box to your room you must
| "configure it" to make it available.
| Stranger43 wrote:
| The big problem for server operations is not the damned
| servers but all of the infrastructure you need to keep
| them running, like power cooling network/storage and
| internet connectivity.
|
| The cloud is not easy but damn trying to get cooling and
| power efficiency of an small server room anywhere near
| the efficiency levels most big data-center publish is
| next to impossible as is multi vendor internet
| connectivity.
|
| With the cloud all of that kind of goes away as it's
| managed by whatever data-center operator that cloud is
| running on but what people forget is that that is also
| true for old fashioned colocation services which is often
| offering a better cost/value then cloud.
|
| And while it's definitely harder to manage stuff like AWS
| or Azure because it bleeds a lot of abstractions small
| scall vpc providers hide from you or that you dont really
| get with a single home server, it's not hard on the scale
| of having to run a couple of racks worth of vmware
| servers with SAN based storage.
| macNchz wrote:
| Totally, though I think in a fast paced/under-resourced
| environment incentives matter, and ephemeral cloud vms
| incentive admins to use configuration management, whereas
| it's easy to take a shortcut in the moment and quickly
| manually install something/edit config on a rarely-
| changing dedicated host.
|
| Obviously the same can be said for long running VMs, and
| this can be solved by having a disciplined team, but I
| think it's generally more likely in an environment with a
| single long running dedicated machine.
| BirAdam wrote:
| I would actually say just invest in the hardware and count the
| asset depreciation on taxes. Further, "scaling" horizontally is
| rather easy if you properly separate functions into different
| servers. For example, a few really light machines running nginx
| (with fastcgi cache enabled, because yes) behind an haproxy
| machine, your PHP/Python/JS/Ruby machines behind your nginx
| machines, and your DB cluster with TiDB or something behind
| that. You've removed the overhead of the container systems and
| the overhead of the virtualization platform. You're no longer
| sharing CPU time with anyone. You're not experiencing as many
| context switches or interrupts. The cost is all upfront though.
| You will still pay for bandwidth and power, but over time your
| cost should be lower.
|
| The main issue in any scenario involving real hardware is that
| you need staff who are competent in both hardware and
| Linux/UNIX systems. Many claim to be on their resumes and then
| cannot perform once on the job (in my experience anyway). In my
| opinion, one of the major reasons for the explosion of the
| cloud world was precisely the difficulty in building and the
| financial cost of building such teams. Additionally, there is a
| somewhat natural (and necessary) friction between application
| developers and systems folks. The systems folks should always
| pushing back and arguing for more security, more process, and
| fewer deployments. The dev team should always be arguing for
| more flexibility, more releases, and less process. Good
| management should then strike the middle path between the two.
| Unfortunately, incompetent managers have often just decided to
| get rid of systems people and move things into AWS land.
|
| Finally, I would just note that cloud architecture is bad for
| the planet as it requires over-provisioning by cloud providers,
| and it requires more computer power overall due to the many
| layers of abstraction. While anyone project is responsible for
| little of this waste, the entire global cloud as an aggregate
| is very wasteful. This bothers me and obviously likely factors
| as an emotional bias in my views (so large amounts of salt for
| all of the above).
| kkielhofner wrote:
| Generally agree but in the US at least from a financial and
| accounting standpoint you can actually do better than the
| favored op-ex of cloud services with a Section 179[0]
| lease[1]. Caveat here, of course, is that you have to have
| income.
|
| The argument could be made you can develop a means to to rent
| physical servers pre-income, then, when it makes sense, you
| can either use standard depreciation -or- Section 179 on
| outright purchases and/or Section 179 leases.
|
| As an example, you can deploy an incredibly capable group of
| let's say four absolutely ridiculous completely over-
| provisioned $100k physical 1U machines in different colo
| facilities for redundancy. There are all kinds of tricks here
| for load balancing and failover with XYZ cloud service, DNS,
| anycast, whatever you want. You can go with various colo
| facilities that operate datacenters around the world, ship
| the hardware from the vendor to them, then provision them
| with Ansible or whatever you're into without ever seeing the
| facility or touching hardware.
|
| So now you have redundant physical hardware that will
| absolutely run circles around most cloud providers
| (especially for I/O), fixed costs like all you can eat
| bandwidth (that doesn't have the 800% markup of cloud
| services, etc) - no more waiting for the inevitable $50k
| cloud bill or trying to track down (in a panic) what caused
| you to exceed your configured cloud budget in a day instead
| of a month. Oh btw, you're not locking yourself into the
| goofy proprietary APIs to provision and even utilize services
| other than virtual machines offered by $BIGCLOUD.
|
| If you're doing any ML you can train on your own hardware or
| (or the occasional cloud) and run inference 24/7 with things
| like the NVIDIA A10. Continuous cloud rental for GPU
| instances is unbelievably expensive and the ROI on purchasing
| the hardware is typically in the range of a few months (or
| way ahead almost immediately with Section 179). As an
| example, I recently did a benchmark with the Nvidia A10 for a
| model we're serving and it can do over 700 inference
| requests/s in FP32 with under 10ms latency. With a single A10
| per chassis across four healthy instances that's 2800 req/s
| (and could probably be tuned further).
|
| Then, if you get REALLY big, you can start getting cabinets
| and beyond. In terms of hardware failures as mentioned, all I
| can say is dual PS RAID-ed out, etc hardware is (in my
| experience) extremely reliable. Frankly having had multiple
| full cabinets of hardware in the past hardware failures were
| few and far between and hardware vendors will include
| incredibles SLAs for replacement. You notify them of the
| failure, they send a tech in < eight hours directly to the
| colo facility and replace the disk, PS, etc with the flashing
| light.
|
| My experience is one (good) FTE resource can easily manage
| this up to multiple cabinet scale. To your point, the current
| issue is many of these people have been snatched up by the
| big cloud providers and replaced (in the market) with
| resources that can navigate the borderline ridiculousness
| that is using dozens (if not more) products/services from
| $BIGCLOUD.
|
| I've also found this configuration is actually MUCH more
| reliable than most $BIGCLOUD. No more wondering what's going
| on with a $BIGCLOUD outage that they won't even acknowledge
| (and that you have absolutely no control over). Coming from a
| background in telecom and healthcare it's completely wild to
| me how uptime has actually gotten much worse with cloud
| providers. Usually you can just tell customers "oh the
| internet is having problems today" because they'll probably
| be seeing headlines about it but for many applications that's
| just totally unacceptable - and we should expect better.
|
| [0] - https://www.section179.org/section_179_deduction/
|
| [1] = https://www.section179.org/section_179_leases/
| BirAdam wrote:
| Do you have a preferred geo-aware DNS, anycast service, or
| similar?
| JaggerJo wrote:
| I also self host on a 4$ box. Quite impressive how much
| performance you get for that kind of money.
|
| Setting up and managing Postgres is a pain tho. Would be nice
| to have a simpler way of getting this all right.
| pepa65 wrote:
| That's what docker is for, making setup simpler.
| baq wrote:
| Getting binaries onto a box is not the hard part of
| administering a RDBMS
| robertlagrant wrote:
| My great hope is either fly.io or cloudflare providing
| managed postgres behind their super lightweight services and
| networking.
| dom96 wrote:
| In general I agree that physical servers are great, but I think
| it's important to note that for most people a $4/month VPS is
| more than enough. So actually 45EUR/month would be overkill in
| that case.
| intelVISA wrote:
| What if, hypothetically, there was a tool that combined
| Terraform and Ansible and was native/performant rather than
| scripted?
| shapefrog wrote:
| I went the opposite direction at Hetzner with the last round of
| price hikes. I now use multiple of the Hetzner Cloud instances
| for my personal projects, for 1/4 of the price (most of the
| time) or for more if I am messing with something in particular.
|
| Peak performance is certainly worse - but I am not too bothered
| if something takes longer to run anyway. You are certainly
| correct on having as much automation in the provisioning of a
| server, something I did not do with a physical server.
| MrGilbert wrote:
| This.
|
| I used to have a root server for my pet projects, but
| honestly, that doesn't make sense. I'm not running a high
| traffic, compute intense SaaS on my machines. It's just a
| static website and some projects. I'm down to monthly costs
| of 24EUR, which includes a storage box of 1 TB to store all
| my data.
| pepa65 wrote:
| You must have great and ultrareliable service. My monthly
| cost is just over $8 and I have one 1TB storage and one 2TB
| storage besides three little machines.
| MrGilbert wrote:
| Yepp, service availability is somewhat great.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Static website I like the combo of Git(Hub,Lab) Pages and
| Cloudflare fronting it for SSL/domain name. Nice and free,
| and if I want to move elsewhere it's also simple enough.
| limteary wrote:
| This is too expensive compared to VPS for lots of personal and
| hobby use cases or minor side business.
|
| I've seen lots of less experienced people overpay for hetzner
| and similar when a $5-10 vps would've worked.
| oauea wrote:
| Just keep in mind your disk can get zapped at any time, so keep
| backups and use raid if possible.
| dspillett wrote:
| The whole VPS can go up in smoke fairly easily too, quite
| literally in some cases. There were a couple of small VPS
| providers hit buy the fire that took out one of OVH's data
| centres and either had no backups or had the backups on other
| machines in the same building. Heck, many cheap VPS providers
| don't have a reliable backup system at all, some are honest
| about it (and tell users to manage their own backups) and
| some are less so. Also remember that a small VPS provider
| will have low staff because the margins are low, so if there
| is any manual intervention needed to restore services when
| there is a hardware failure you might find spinning up a new
| VPS elsewhere, restoring your own backups1, and switching
| over DNS, is faster than the hosting providers restore
| process. And their backups are often daily, with your own you
| may be able to efficiently manage much more frequent (hourly,
| or even perhaps near real-time if your apps are not write-
| intensive) snapshots. You aren't going to get a 1-hour max
| restore and 1-hour max data-loss guarantee for $4/month!
|
| Keep backups in any case. Preferably on another provider or
| at least in a different physical location. And, of course,
| test them.
|
| And if you are managing a good backup regime, and monitoring
| your data/app anyway, is monitoring drives a significant
| extra hardship?
|
| -- [1] in fact if you automate the restore process to another
| location, which I do for a couple of my bits, then you can
| just hit that button and update DNS when complete, and maybe
| allocate a bit more RAM+cores (my test mirrors are smaller
| than the live VMs as they don't need to serve real use
| patterns).
| bluehatbrit wrote:
| I do exactly this, using Hetzner as well. I was managing some
| side projects and self-hosting and the bill just seemed to
| creep up because the VPS's we never power enough to host. I
| started feeling the need to add more VPS's and then I started
| shopping around. In the end I got a similar deal and specs. I
| can do anything I want with it now and even with quite a few
| self hosted services and projects I'm still running at only
| about 10-15% capacity.
|
| If I want to spin up a new project or try out hosting something
| new it takes a couple minutes and I've got the scripts.
| Deployments are fast, maintenance is low, and I have far more
| for my money.
|
| For anyone who's interested this is the rough cut of what I'm
| using: * Ansible to manage everything * A tiny bit of terraform
| for some DNS entries which I may replace one day * restic for
| backups, again controlled by ansible * tailscale for vpn (I
| have some pi's running at home, nothing major but tailscale
| makes it easy and secure) * docker-compose for pretty much
| everything else
| JSavageOne wrote:
| I'm not a devops guy but I had to manage our Ansible deployment
| at one of my first jobs and always despised it. Scripts that
| would work locally would often not work on the Ansible
| deployment, and it was hard to debug. The other engineer (don't
| think he had experience with it either prior to the job) also
| felt the same way.
|
| I was more of a junior dev at the time so maybe I was an idiot,
| but I don't miss it at all. In theory I agree with what you're
| saying, but deploying a Dockerfile to something like Google
| Cloud Run is just a hell of a lot easier. Yea I'm paying more
| than what I would be managing my own VPS, but I think this is
| more than offset by the dev hours saved.
| lallysingh wrote:
| I think 5 reasons:
|
| 1. Forces config to be reproducible, as VMs will go down.
|
| 2. You can get heavy discounts on AWS that reduce the pain.
|
| 3. The other stuff you have access to atop the VMs that's
| cheaper/faster once your stuff is already in the cloud
|
| 4. Easier to have a documented system config (e.g. AWS docs)
| than train people/document what special stuff you have in-
| house. Especially useful in hiring new folks.
|
| 5. You don't need space or redundant power/internet/etc on
| premesis. Just enough to let people run their laptops.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I've been on a physical server for years, but the problem is
| wear & tear and eventually they will shut down forever; unless
| you're willing to set up backups and a recovery plan for
| physical hardware failure, I'd stick with a VPS for now.
|
| I used a VPS before that, but stopped and switched to a
| physical one because it was a better deal and we didn't run
| into CPU limit(ation)s.
| komali2 wrote:
| For me I'm wondering about ISP overhead. When I rent a VPS I'm
| more confident in their uptime and that all the funky dns shit
| I'm less confident in will just work. I run a home server as a
| hobby and I had to do all sorts of weird negotiating with my
| isp to make sure I always have uptime. Then my shitty modem
| that the isp refuses to let me replace randomly resets my
| forwarded ports once every 6 months or so. Etc just weird shit
| like that.
|
| I guess if I was investigating commercial options I'd have the
| "trunk" sorted at the office with a commercial isp solution,
| static IP, good IT hardware maybe, but from what I know at this
| exact moment if a client needed hosting I'd always go straight
| to renting a vps.
| nik736 wrote:
| That server does not come with ECC RAM!
| coder543 wrote:
| The person at the top of the thread claimed EUR45/month, but
| the configuration they're describing actually seems to be
| EUR37/month.
|
| If you want ECC RAM, that appears to be EUR60/month, and it
| also steps up to a more powerful 8-core CPU.
|
| Regardless, if we're talking about a "full production
| environment and a duplicate staging/standby environment" (to
| quote the person you replied to), then EUR60/month * (2 or 3)
| is still dirt cheap compared to any startup's AWS bill that
| I've seen.
|
| Use cases vary, but I tend to agree that AWS/GCP/Azure is not
| the answer to every problem.
|
| For someone who can fit their application onto a $4 VPS,
| that's obviously going to be cheaper than anything bare
| metal, but the cloud scales _up_ very expensively in many
| cases. Bare metal isn 't the answer to every problem either,
| but a lot of people in the industry don't seem to appreciate
| when it can be the right answer.
| ska wrote:
| > and cost more.
|
| for the same spec, sure. I think virtuals make sense at both
| ends - either dynamic scalability for large N is important, or
| you only actually _need_ a small fraction of a physical box.
| Paying 45 /mo for something that runs find on 5/mo isn't
| sensible either, and gives you more flexibility for not ganging
| things together just to use your server.
| sideproject wrote:
| I've always been pretty cheap with my spendings on VPS. So, when
| building my web applications, even if the traffic is building up,
| I opted into optimizing before upgrading hardware.
|
| I've been doing this for more than 10 years and I've been making
| incremental (sometimes really small) improvements to the way my
| web apps work so that I rarely need to go down to AWS, k8s, load
| balancer etc etc way.
|
| Sure, these are personal projects and of course there is a
| diminishing return on optimizing (so I do upgrade hardware when I
| need to), but I always found it a rewarding challenge to first
| look at understanding the inherent issue, rather than just
| throwing money at it (at my work, it's completely opposite - see
| an issue? throw money and upgrade hardware ASAP and move on).
|
| Some things I've done for optimizing are...
|
| - Simple upgrading of software - going to latest postgres,
| upgrading PHP - Identifying data that are not frequently updated
| and then caching them - I've identified some bot traffics coming
| from China, so for one of my projects, I just blocked it
| completely (yeah, drastic I know, but not worth my $2!!)
|
| There are also many many services out there that provide free
| tiers that you can utilize. So as a solo, indie dev, there are
| many ways to leverage to stay on a cheap $5 linode box as long as
| you need (I saw recently a box for $2.50 - tempting...)
| habibur wrote:
| Personally for me the $5 ones no longer work. Nightly "dnf
| update" gobbles up >1GB of memory for God knows why and kills off
| httpd or application server randomly.
|
| But a ~$10 virtual box with 2GB of RAM works fine. Nothing to
| complain. I get 2TB transfer and 50 GB space.
| trollied wrote:
| I just add a 4Gb swapfile using a file on the filesystem, works
| just fine.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| Same. I even have some scripts in the past that would use
| more memory for some operations that would first add extra
| swapfile, do stuff, then remove it after.
| sys42590 wrote:
| Agreed, a swap(file) on a NVME SSD can keep the kernel's OOM
| killer away while still yielding quite acceptable performance
| under many workloads.
| mongrelion wrote:
| Thank you for this. I have been having some issues recently
| with one of my servers and my solution was to increase the
| size of the tmp mount but that's basically a Russian
| roulette.
|
| Enabling swap during the update sounds like an elegant
| solution.
| MonkeyClub wrote:
| > Nightly "dnf update" gobbles up >1GB of memory for God knows
| why
|
| It's for packagekit, which is known to suck in this way.
|
| A `systemctl restart packagekit` right after the update will
| immediately drop it below 30MB.
| szastamasta wrote:
| I was running one of my products on 7 5$ instances from
| DigitalOcean. Which includes load balancer (Apache), database
| with replication, static site hosting, web app and 2 backends. It
| was happily serving hundreds of concurrent users with quite a lot
| of space to still grow. With their s3 clone and few volumes we
| rarely paid more than 45$ per month. You really can get far with
| cheap cloud machines.
| narag wrote:
| I rented my first VPS 15 years ago and it was cheap. IIRC the VPS
| software was called Virtuozzo. Since I was using Java at work, it
| seemed a good idea to install a Java CMS:
|
| https://pebble.sourceforge.net/
|
| But it was not so easy. Java refused to start with an out-of-
| memory error. It took me many hours to find out that the VPS had
| assigned very little memory at start. It was possible for the JVM
| to expand once running, but the initial request had to be small
| enough to avoid the error and not so small as to prevent Pebble
| from running.
|
| Once this problem was fixed and iptables set, everything was
| fine. I even setup postmail. But the experience taught me that a
| VPS has different rules. I wouldn't trust the measurements in the
| article. They could depend on the load that other VPS in the same
| machine are supporting at the same time.
| KronisLV wrote:
| > I used K6 to perform a load test. K6 is a software that will
| generate "virtual users" who continuously run test scenarios
| defined using javascript.
|
| K6s is a pretty good load testing tool, however my problem with
| it is that it doesn't simulate _everything_ a browser does:
| fetching all of the image files, fonts, as well as anything that
| might get downloaded and executed after upgrading the version of
| your application with some new functionality, but forgetting
| about adding new API routes etc. to the tests (e.g. if a new
| panel in the app gets loaded even without explicit user input,
| say, a new UI improvement with some useful data). You might need
| to do updates to your test code with each next app version for
| this, a relatively high maintenance approach.
|
| The way I've worked around this previously was setting up
| Selenium + Python inside of containers that were assigned system
| users through a centralized service I wrote for that and then
| used the site in question like a real user would. It was pretty
| close to the real world, though sadly didn't scale too well -
| because with each automated browser instance needing ~512 MB of
| RAM, only small amounts of users could be viably tested.
|
| Either way, small VPSes are still a great option in my eyes!
| Here's a few providers that I've personally found viable:
| - Hetzner: https://www.hetzner.com/cloud (time based billing,
| good selection of services, also allows easily attaching more
| storage etc.) - Contabo: https://contabo.com/en (pretty
| good option, the UI used to be a bit antiquated, there are setup
| fees, apparently a bit overprovisioned) - Time4VPS:
| https://www.time4vps.com/?affid=5294 (I use them for my sites,
| affordable and stable, though not as modern as Hetzner; affiliate
| link, remove affid otherwise) - Scaleway:
| https://www.scaleway.com/en/stardust-instances/ (overall
| expensive, but their Stardust offering is pretty good, when
| available, which isn't that often)
|
| Apart from that, it can also be quite useful to take some old
| hardware and turn it into your own homelab - I'm currently doing
| that for my NAS, backup nodes and CI nodes, just a few AMD 200
| GEs with 35 W TDP that are way cheaper than anything that
| actually needs good uptime. For example, buying a 1 or 2 TB HDD
| for storing data is cheaper than most cloud options, even when
| you include additional expenses for backups. As for compute, it
| varies - if you have workloads that need to infrequently do lots
| of number crunching, the cloud can be cheaper, actually.
| txtai wrote:
| There is also a push to run machine learning models on low-
| resource devices, which a $4 VPS could be categorized as.
|
| https://www.tensorflow.org/lite
|
| https://huggingface.co/muhtasham/olm-bert-tiny-december-2022
|
| https://neuml.hashnode.dev/train-a-language-model-from-scrat...
| smileybarry wrote:
| I remember some CPU-overloading loads categorized as "mining"
| in various cloud providers and shut down. I wonder if ML
| training will cause the same false-positives. (Or "true
| positive" in the case of "excessive load not allowed"
| providers)
| txtai wrote:
| This concept was more for inference on-demand vs training a
| model. For example, if there was an API call that had a model
| call as part of it's workflow. Training even a small model
| still requires serious compute power.
| tw1984 wrote:
| for me, thanks to the Great Firewall, a $4 vps makes the
| difference of whether I can visit HN or not.
| 77pt77 wrote:
| My VPS is about $15 a year.
|
| I run my own OpenVPN, ssh, SMTP (postfix) and even http(s) and
| dav server.
|
| I also have a wiki and an ftp server.
|
| Most of the services are on the VPN private address space.
|
| I honestly don't need to look for alternatives.
|
| It's far more than enough.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| I've been running my company website for years on $5 Linode. I
| used to host everything on there (downloads, update checking,
| crash reporting, licensing, a Postgres database for everything).
|
| I've never had any performance issues. A $5 VPS is plenty for
| Apache, PHP, PostgreSQL, for a few thousand users a day.
|
| I've started using multiple VPS, one for each service. Not for
| performance reasons, but for two things:
|
| - isolation: if there's a problem with one service (eg. logs used
| up all disk space) it doesn't bring everything down at once
|
| - maintainability: it's easier to upgrade services one by one
| than all at once
| flumpcakes wrote:
| I pay for a VM that is _not_ hosted on the major cloud platforms,
| it comes with 6 cores, 16GiB RAM, 100GiB NVMe, a public IPv4
| address, and 32TiB of bandwidth (supposedly I 've never even used
| 1% of that) for 15 euro a month. It can handle anything I could
| throw at it. I currently use it to test kubernetes deployments
| with helm and k3s.
|
| You cannot get anything anywhere close to that in Azure, GCP,
| AWS, etc. for that price.
|
| For work we're running in Azure with Kubernetes. We're going full
| "microservices" design, and our data store for every service so
| far is MongoDB. We're approaching 20,000 PS/pcm just for
| "development". We will hit a yearly cost of PS600,000 by the end
| of this year. This has been an R&D/Dev/Dev "Architect" show since
| day 1, so this cost doesn't include any DR or backups or any of
| the non functional requirements from Infra/Security/etc. I don't
| even think we will have a single production service live by the
| end of the year, despite C-level pushing for it as this adventure
| in Azure has been on-going since mid-2021. We've changed
| architects several times, with new ones inheriting what has
| already been completed, with the last set to start having to ask
| me what Istio is and how it works. All of our services are using
| it, and this particular architect was responsible for introducing
| a 'back end for front end' so I would have assumed should have
| been familiar with this.
|
| I still think the cloud offerings from Azure/GCP/AWS are very
| cool. Although trusting the developers who didn't care about on-
| premise infrastructure and performance and security, including
| things like backups, etc. to suddenly care about it in the
| 'cloud' is foolish. But I'm probably just a jaded grouchy old
| person now.
|
| It might just be poor developers at my company though, for our
| on-premise SaaS solutions which are currently where we make our
| money, we had to spin up 30 new virtual machines to run copies of
| an application because no one could figure out why one particular
| service had a single thread block/bug meaning each instance could
| only service ~6 requests per second.
|
| Lucky we only had ~100 req/s peak, rather than 1,000 or 10,000 or
| ...
| INTPenis wrote:
| > I pay for a VM that is not hosted on the major cloud
| platforms
|
| Where?
| flumpcakes wrote:
| Contabo - I pay a few euro more for the luxury of having the
| VPS in the UK. I think you can get the same specs for 13 euro
| if it is hosted in Germany.
| edsonmedina wrote:
| conclusion: inconclusive
| jahewson wrote:
| Dollar store hosting providers have dollar store security
| practices. I would never trust them with user's data.
| jasfi wrote:
| You can get a lot of power for your money with Zap Hosting
| (https://zap-hosting.com). I've been quite happy with them.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| For 5 EUR / month you can also get a dedicated server (not a VPS)
| from OVH.
|
| Sure it's only an ATOM N2800 with 4 GB of RAM / 1 TB SSD / 100
| Mbit/s bandwith (which is definitely the bottleneck as I've got
| gigabit fiber to the home).
|
| But it's 5 EUR / month for a dedicated server (and it's got free
| OVH DDoS protection too as they offer it on every single one of
| their servers).
|
| I set up SSH login on these using FIDO/U2F security key only (no
| password, no software public/private keys: I only allow physical
| security key logins). I only allow SSH in from the CIDR blocks of
| the ISPs I know I'll only ever reasonably be login from and just
| DROP all other incoming traffic to the SSH port. This keeps the
| logs pristine.
|
| Nice little pet these are.
|
| I'm not recommending these 5 EUR / month servers for production
| systems but they're quite capable compared to their price.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| OVH? Make sure to get some geo redundancy going!
| reyqn wrote:
| Well... Like anywhere else...
| doix wrote:
| I've got something called "Kimsufi 2G" which I've been paying
| for since 2013. It's only got 2GB of RAM and 500gb SSD, but
| it's been going strong since then. The same thing runs a small
| IRC and mumble server for my friend group. I use it primarily
| for wireguard and hosting random tiny projects.
|
| Works really well, highly recommend it. I don't block traffic
| from anywhere since I travel a lot. It's interesting to open
| the nginx logs and see all the automated scans checking me out.
| olabyne wrote:
| or a dedicated Raspi 4 at Ikoula, which is not bad speaking
| about perf/price and Gb-Ram/price
| TheRoque wrote:
| I was going to recommend OVH too, they have such cheap
| offerings for VPS too (on the screen in the article, we see
| that their 4$ VPS has 500MB RAM (probably amazon lightsail),
| for that same price you get 2GB RAM on OVH VPS I didn't see
| your 5EUR/month offer though
|
| I'd think they are fit for production, a few services use them,
| like Lichess (can see their stack here
| https://lichess.org/costs )
| netule wrote:
| A bit off-topic, but thanks for linking that breakdown. I
| would never have thought that a chess website would cost
| $400k/y to operate.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| Oh my bad: OVH is totally fit for production and they've got
| very good DDoS protection (which you can combine with
| CloudFlare and whatnots) but...
|
| I just meant that I wouldn't recommend the 5 EUR / month
| dedicated servers for production: these do not have a big
| bandwidth and they don't have ECC RAM.
|
| I edited my other post accordingly.
| blibble wrote:
| > OVH is totally fit for production and they've got very
| good DDoS protection (which you can combine with CloudFlare
| and whatnots)
|
| the very good DDoS protection just seems to null route YOUR
| ip if it receives more than a certain amount of
| traffic/second
|
| for me it used to trigger a few times a year from just
| random internet noise, like a portscan (as no-one other
| than me knew the host even existed)
| cbcr wrote:
| > just seems to null route YOUR ip if it receives more
| than a certain amount of traffic/second
|
| This is not how it works. I recommend you go to the
| related webpages (just type "OVH antiddos" on Google),
| the anti-DDoS system is well documented nowadays.
|
| If you _actually_ suffer from "null-routing"-like issues
| when the anti-DDoS triggers, you might want to get in
| touch with the support team to escalate the issue.
|
| I have a feeling they may be very interested about this.
| nl wrote:
| This is a great breakdown.
|
| Seeing their single greatest cost line-item being "site
| moderation" (more than developer salary!) is such a stark
| reminder of where the real problems running an internet
| service are.
| sva_ wrote:
| Oracle Cloud gives away an arm vps with 4 CPUs, 24gb ram, and
| 200gb disk for free.
|
| https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/#always-free
| deltarholamda wrote:
| FWIW, if your Free Tier Oracle service seems to go "unused"--
| which isn't defined as far as I can tell, and the one I use
| as a DNS server was dinged for being "unused"--you run the
| risk of it being shut down and you have to restart it, unless
| you upgrade to a pay-as-you-go account.
|
| This is a new thing as of last week, I think.
|
| Also, Oracle Cloud's management interface is best described
| as "let's make this as complicated as AWS, but with more
| 'Enterprise-y' features, but somehow worse in every possible
| way."
|
| That said, I can't fault Oracle for being Oracle. I knew what
| I was getting myself into. And their "Always Free" tier is
| still free. And it does work well enough for my purposes.
| extra88 wrote:
| Here's what Oracle says:
|
| Reclamation of Idle Compute Instances
|
| Idle Always Free compute instances may be reclaimed by
| Oracle. Oracle will deem virtual machine and bare metal
| compute instances as idle if, during a 7-day period, the
| following are true: * CPU utilization for
| the 95th percentile is less than 10% * Network
| utilization is less than 10% * Memory utilization is
| less than 10% (applies to A1 shapes only)
|
| https://docs.oracle.com/en-
| us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier...
| extra88 wrote:
| I need a Debian package that's a like a "mouse jiggler"
| for the CPU, a process that will automatically use enough
| CPU to satisfy Oracle.
| Arnavion wrote:
| Just run a `while :; do :; done` shell script under
| `nice` (to have lower priority than everything else) and
| then under `cpulimit` (to have an upper bound on CPU
| usage), or in a cgroup.
| sva_ wrote:
| Well, it was a good month with it then, I guess. My
| ArchArm box isn't really utilized that much.
|
| edit: stress --vm-bytes $(awk
| '/MemAvailable/{printf "%d\n", $2 \* 0.12;}' <
| /proc/meminfo)k --vm-keep -m 1
|
| And limit CPU use using cpulimit.
| saagarjha wrote:
| I've been unable to actually provision one of those,
| unfortunately.
| jackdh wrote:
| The problem with free tiers however is always free does not
| mean 'always' free.
| znpy wrote:
| I have one of those.
|
| They're pretty much worthless. That atom processor hasn't even
| got support for AES-NI, meaning that all crypto must be done
| without hardware acceleration.
|
| Basically all traffic (https? ssh? sftp? vpn?) is heavy duty
| for that procesor for the sole reason of existing.
|
| I can literally see a cpu 100% busy because i'm downloading a
| file over sftp in another terminal.
|
| Unless you're doing stuff in cleartext, which restricts the
| acceptable use cases by a lot.
|
| Really, that kind of servers are really toys.
|
| Also, in case of problems the datacenter people will just shut
| it off, replace it and re-provision it. I had the (single) disk
| fail on my kimsufi and the OVH people replaced it and rebooted
| my server to a blank state.
|
| Ok fine, thank you and everything but where did my data go?
| Who's been handling my data on the PHYSICAL disk?
|
| Really, those servers are barely toys.
|
| Don't get me wrong though: great toys, but TOYS.
| jcul wrote:
| Had a similar experience with online.net's dedibox.
|
| Was a customer for years, and one day they said my server had
| died and gave some excuse that there was no way to physically
| access the hard drive as it was in a rack of other servers or
| something along those lines.
|
| So what happens to my data? It can't be recovered but when is
| it going to be securely destroyed?
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| > For 5 EUR / month you can also get a dedicated server (not a
| VPS) from OVH.
|
| Where?
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| OVH "ECO Kimsufi" offering. Now... You'll need to "refresh"
| regularly the page for the 4.99 EUR one (I rounded @ 5 EUR
| but it's 4.99) for they're in demand and often sold out. Or
| you write a script that monitors the page to see when they're
| available again.
|
| I had to wait a few days to fetch my last one but I got it.
| Always do : )
|
| On OVH's website: OVH cloud / Bare metal & VPS / ECO
| Dedicated Servers.
|
| P.S: back in the days the "Kimsufi" (french for "qui me
| suffit", literally "which is enough (for me)") used to be
| part of OVH, then OVH spun Kimsufi out of OVH and then now...
| Kimsufi are back into OVH (the older Kimsufi servers are
| still accessed using the old Kimsufi credentials but the
| newer ones are using the OVH credentials again).
| ritonlajoie wrote:
| not 'qui me dit', but 'qui me suffit'
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| Oops (edited my post to fix it).
| stavros wrote:
| > back in the days the "Kimsufi" (french for "qui me dit",
| literally "which is enough")
|
| Surely, "qui me suffit".
| sourcecodeplz wrote:
| They are there but rarely in stock. Also they start from
| $6.10 now.
| [deleted]
| explodingcamera wrote:
| Check out their kimsufi offering
| prmoustache wrote:
| Fun fact for non french speakers. Kimsufi sounds like "qui
| me suffit" which is the french for "which is enough for
| me".
| megous wrote:
| Nowhere aparently. At least not now.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| If you check here, you'll see they mention them:
|
| https://eco.ovhcloud.com/fr/compare/
|
| But then when you click on the link you'll see the 4.99
| offering and then after a split-second it's removed
| (because none are available atm).
|
| But really: with some patience anybody can fetch one. Or
| you "cheat" and you use a script to see when they're
| available.
|
| In my experience they're easier to fetch "when Europe
| sleeps" (so, say, at around 3am in France).
| pepa65 wrote:
| Just got one. Also, you can view servers that are NOT
| available, and see them listed. When they become
| available, you can order them.
| boneitis wrote:
| Yes, I was able to snag one ($6.10) about an hour after I
| first checked, where it was originally disappearing after
| a split-second for me.
|
| Just a small gotcha for anyone considering migrating off
| another platform: I only realized after purchase the
| 100Mbps advertised network bandwidth, versus a $5
| Lightsail's advertised ~400-500 that I'm moving over
| from.
| jacooper wrote:
| SSD? its showing up as 1TB hdd sata
| tomxor wrote:
| One word of caution:
|
| The smallest VPS are also the most unreliable in my experience.
| If that's a requirement of your low compute project, it may make
| sense to massively over provision with either a more expensive
| VPS or dedicated server. I'm not sure why but I suspect it's some
| combination of older server hardware being relegated to host lots
| of tiny VPS (which tend to host less uptime-critical things).
| Sharing the hardware between more VPS giving rise to more
| problems, e.g abuse, or over loading since they will be on
| average under-provisioned.
|
| This is of course completely anecdotal, historical and
| speculation, some providers offerings may be just as stable at
| the bottom end. But it's certainly more likely at the bottom end.
| Tepix wrote:
| If you put several of these ultra cheap VPS behind something
| like Cloudflare, doesn't that mostly solve the problem with
| them being down every now and then?
| margorczynski wrote:
| I guess you would need to take care additionally for perfect
| replication of the stateful sources of truth like a RDBMS to
| not loose consistency
| tomxor wrote:
| Sure, if it's simple to horizontally scale your service.
|
| But unless it's a simple static site it's usually not, and
| it's usually a source of a lot of complexity and pain. Which
| unless you really are doing something twitter scale, is not
| worth it.
|
| By the time you've bought a handful of tiny VPSs and put in
| the work to horizontally scale your service, you could have
| put the same money with zero effort into a very reliable
| dedicated server. Spend the effort elsewhere and save your
| sanity (and probably improve your reliability).
|
| Yes I'm biased against horizontal scaling.
| comprev wrote:
| I have worked with several small clients to migrate away from
| AWS/Azure instances onto dedicated hardware from Hetzner or IBM
| "Bare Metal" hardware.
|
| The question I ask first is: as a company, what is an acceptable
| downtime per year?
|
| I give some napkin calculated figures for 95%, 99%, 99.9% and
| 99.99% to show how both cost and complexity can skyrocket when
| chasing 9s.
|
| They soon realise that a pair of live/standby servers might be
| more than suitable for their business needs at that particular
| time (and for the foreseeable future).
|
| There is an untapped market of clients moving _away_ from the
| cloud.
| lbriner wrote:
| SLA is overrated. SLA mostly relates to "unplanned downtime" so
| if you need to often fix things, just schedule downtime, mess
| around with it and bring it back up.
|
| Also, we have seen both cloud and non-cloud hosts having
| significant downtime more than their SLA but just put it down
| to a "small subset of our customers" so they don't have to do
| anything.
|
| It's a bit like my Student Loan guarantee, "Do the paperwork
| and we guarantee you will have the loan on time". The loan was
| not paid, "I thought you guaranteed it?" "We do but we made a
| mistake" "So what do I get because of the guarantee?"
| "Nothing". Cheers!
| znpy wrote:
| > They soon realise that a pair of live/standby servers might
| be more than suitable for their business needs at that
| particular time (and for the foreseeable future).
|
| I've worked at one of those companies that have the
| live/standby model in place.
|
| The problem is, how to switch load from live to stand-by in
| case of problem often requires manual intervention and a
| procedure.
|
| The procedure must be tested from time to time, and adjusted
| according to changes.
|
| Oh and the live and standby environments must be kept in
| sync...
| kccoder wrote:
| My go to setup if I need more uptime that a single server
| running in google cloud with live migration grants, is a
| three node galera cluster, with an A-record pointing to each
| node, which also runs the application in addition to the
| database. You can do rolling updates without any downtime,
| and I've even had setups like this go years without downtime.
| It isn't perfect but it works very well and obviates having
| to worry about things like stand-by switchover.
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| isn't this just kubernetes with 2 nodes? that's what I'm
| doing. it's like $100/mo
| bak3y wrote:
| I've always heard that adding another 9 adds another 3 zeros to
| the cost.
| zamadatix wrote:
| At one dollar for 99 that's a billion dollars for 99.999.
| Seems a bit extreme on each end for a three 9's difference.
| rovr138 wrote:
| For anyone wondering, 0.001% of downtime a year is 5 mins
| 16 secs.
| sa46 wrote:
| I like the mnemonic that five 9s is five minutes a year.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| We need nine 5s of uptime. 55.5555555% uptime AT LEAST.
| njovin wrote:
| IME many companies claim 99.99+ uptime but then the penalties
| are trivial. If a 99.99 SLA is busted with an hour of
| downtime in a month but the penalty is 5% bill credit, the
| company just lost $500 on $10k revenue, assuming that:
|
| A) Customers actually chase the credit, which (again IME)
| many companies make very difficult
|
| B) The downtime is very clearly complete downtime. I've seen
| instances where a mobile app is completely down (but the web
| product works) or a key API is down (but the core product
| works) or there are delays in processing data (but eventually
| things are coming through). All of these can cause downstream
| downtime to customers but may not be covered by a "downtime"
| SLA.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Once a company claimed nine 9s (99.9999999%, 0.03 seconds
| down per year) uptime on their new cloud service to me.
| When pressed how they came up with the number their
| measurement they said they were measuring the percentage of
| time the login webpage loaded (not that you could log in or
| things worked inside the page and app) and the
| https://uptime.is/ tool only went up to nine 9's.
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| I've recently started deploying on Cloudflare workers.
|
| They're cheap and "infinitely scalable." I originally picked them
| for my CRUD API because I didn't want to have to worry about
| scaling. I've built/managed an internal serverless platform at
| FAANG and, after seeing inside the sausage factory, I just wanted
| to focus on product this time around.
|
| But I've noticed something interesting/awesome about my change in
| searches while working on product. I no longer search for things
| like "securely configuring ssh," "setting up a bastion,"
| "securing a Postgres deployment," or "2022 NGinx SSL
| configuration" - an entire class of sysadmin and security
| problems just go away when picking workers with D1. I sleep
| better knowing my security and operations footprint is reduced
| and straightforward to reason about. I can use all those extra
| cycles to focus on building.
|
| I can't see the ROI of managing a full Linux stack on an R620
| plugged into a server rack vs. Workers when you factor in the
| cost of engineering time to maintain the former.
|
| I do think this is a new world though. AWS doesn't compare. I'd
| pick my R620s plugged into a server rack over giving AWS my
| credit card any day. AWS architectures are easy to bloat and get
| expensive fast - both in engineering cost and bills.
| austhrow743 wrote:
| How's the developer experience of writing code for workers?
| matthewfcarlson wrote:
| Pretty fantastic (not an employee of cloud flare or anything,
| just a happy customer). They have this concept of mini flare
| that you can host a tiny cloud flare on your dev box/CI
| pipeline so it makes it easy to run unit tests and the like.
| thewataccount wrote:
| Is there any way to self host it? I'm concerned about
| vendor lock-in
| haolez wrote:
| What are you using to manage your schema? Do you use an ORM?
| Maybe something like PocketBase[0]?
|
| [0]https://pocketbase.io/
| matthewfcarlson wrote:
| I looked at pocketbase and other tools, but decided to keep
| it simple.
|
| Like GP, I'm also using D1
| (https://developers.cloudflare.com/d1) which is based on
| SQLite and still in early Alpha. In combination with KV
| (https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/learning/how-kv-
| wo...) it's trivial to have a great database layer with
| caching using kysely
| (https://github.com/aidenwallis/kysely-d1) and trpc
| (https://trpc.io) you can have typing from DB to front end.
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| Nope. Just have a directory:
| ./sql/0001_create_users.sql
| ./sql/0002_create_sessions.sql ....
|
| Each query for modifying the schema is idempotent and safe to
| be rerun.
|
| Then I do: ls ./sql | xargs -I{} wrangler d1
| execute <db> --file {}
|
| Can put that in a script to make things easy. You use the
| same script to modify the db as you do to bootstrap a db from
| scratch.
| matthewfcarlson wrote:
| I completely agree. Most of my personal projects are unlikely
| to ever go above 50 concurrent users, so I don't really benefit
| from the scaling part of cloud flare, but I recently switched
| to using cloud flare pages for all new personal projects and
| it's fantastic. The ease of use really makes my life all that
| much better.
|
| Just buy a domain name and start deploying. Unlike other cloud
| providers (looking at you Azure/AWS) the time from push to
| deployment finished is under a minute. Azure could take 15-20
| minutes and AWS still relied on zip file uploads for functions
| last I checked.
| impulser_ wrote:
| I'm scared to use Cloudflare products, because yes they are
| cheap and good but the company is burning money, not profitable
| and has large amount of debt. They wil have to raise those
| prices to not be cheap. Can you predict when and how much they
| will increase those prices?
|
| If you depend on them for everything and then they decide to
| make a big price increase to become profitable. Will you be
| able to handle that price increase? You are pretty much stuck
| with paying the price.
|
| Yeah other companies can increase their prices, but most of the
| time profitable companies in cloud infrastructure will only
| increase if their expenses increase and this is pretty
| predictable if you pay attention to costs. Like last year it
| was pretty easy to predict a price increase coming because of
| inflation and supply chain issues.
| [deleted]
| jimkoen wrote:
| Imo, even if they tripled their pricing, they'd still be more
| cheap than any serverless product other cloud providers have
| to offer. Looking at their performance over the past 2 years,
| their losses are in no proportion to their revenue increase
| [0].
|
| I'm nervous about them changing their pricing too, but just
| the fact that they're so much more transparent than AWS or
| GCE is a net plus for me, even with an increase in price.
|
| [0]https://simplywall.st/stocks/us/software/nyse-
| net/cloudflare...
|
| (ignore the contents and forecast of the article and just
| look at the graph)
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| I'll second this.
|
| It's also worth noting the development patterns they force
| when building on Workers and Pages sends you down the path
| of a fairly portable architecture.
|
| I can't say anything I'm doing would be difficult to port
| to another provider on short notice.
| OJFord wrote:
| How's that 100MB limit on D1 going though? I realise support
| for 'larger' databases is coming, but it gives me the
| impression they don't intend it ever to be a main application
| database, for anything that's not small and with a fairly
| constant data requirement (not scaling with users adding
| content, say).
| wesleyyue wrote:
| cf workers look so promising, but their pricing makes websocket
| / persistent connections untenable. I know they are possible
| with durable objects, but wish they would have a full product
| story around actually building apps with live requirements with
| pricing that makes sense.
| kristianpaul wrote:
| Try also google always free tier first and see what you can get
| done with that for a start
| https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/free-cloud-features#compu...
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| You can run at least 1000 xmpp active xmpp connections.
| pella wrote:
| Contabo https://contabo.com/en/vps/
|
| Hetzner https://www.hetzner.com/cloud
|
| Scaleway https://www.scaleway.com/en/pricing/?tags=compute
| znpy wrote:
| I signed up to scaleway only to find out the server I wanted to
| buy was out of stock.
|
| And that was not shown anywhere before the signup.
|
| So yeah, i'm downvoting for scaleway too.
| Mortiffer wrote:
| down vote for Scaleway, got burned by them.
|
| They changed the pricing out under me and make it difficult to
| migrate out. At the time there was a very restrictive upload
| bandwidth so it would have taken weeks to upload my database
| backup files to the new hetzner servers. We ended up putting
| effort into finding the core data which can't be lost and only
| uploading those individual tables/row filters.
|
| IDK how they are now but for sure go check upload limits.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Does anyone know of the equivalent of Terraform for on-prem
| hardware? I explicitly do not want an automated agent that
| applies things or anything like that.
|
| I want to do this:
|
| - image some hardware with Ubuntu
|
| - set up SSH
|
| - write a definition file, HCL is fine
|
| - run a program that uses the definition and the IP address of
| the machine that applies the definition installing files,
| programs, whatever or removing them
|
| It would be cool if:
|
| 1. There were a terraform provider for this
|
| 2. I can specify which IP address the hardware is at
|
| 3. `terraform apply` and be done with it
|
| The cloud is absolutely fantastic for lots of things, and we have
| a mix of cloud infra and on-prem hardware. Ideally, I'm looking
| for something a 4-person team can manage with some wiggle room
| for failure. If we hit 99.9 we're fine, maybe even get by with
| 99.
|
| After all, the alternative is that I reimage one of the servers
| on the few racks we have and it takes precious time but it's not
| really a problem.
| dpedu wrote:
| I'm a heavy terraform user and I want something like this too.
| HCL and the surrounding tooling is just so nice.
|
| I mainly use puppet to manage my hobby machines & VMs, and
| puppet does violate the agentless bit you mentioned. What I
| like about it (over something like Ansible) is that it
| understands the resource dependency tree like Terraform does.
| Furthermore, I've set up my implementation so that it restores
| backups after installing services. So, for me, rebuilding a
| server is simply running a backup (optional) and then wiping
| the box.
|
| I saw a libvirt provider for terraform recently that can SSH to
| a host and then operate the libvirt API on it. That seems like
| a good starting point for something like this; take the SSH
| parts and use it to manage resources like files on the remote
| host.
|
| I've written a few simple terraform providers, it's not that
| hard to do. This sounds like a fun project and I'm pretty
| tempted to do this, actually.
| tgtweak wrote:
| Throw free cloudflare tier in front of it and you can get pretty
| far on $4/mo.
| outworlder wrote:
| > For the database, I chose to use MongoDB. I picked it because
| it is simple to set up, popular, and claims of being web scale.
|
| "web scale", but it's on a $4 VPS? What does that matter? I
| expect PG to do better.
| pknerd wrote:
| Am I the only one who googled about the company offering $4 VPS?
| throwawaaarrgh wrote:
| Does anyone here remember developing applications on machines
| with 25MHz of CPU and 8MB of memory? That VPC has probably 1GHz
| CPU and 1GB of memory.
|
| How you develop an application depends completely on what you
| have available to you and what its use case is. If you don't have
| money, design it to be resource-efficient. If you do have money,
| design it to be a resource pig. If it needs to be high
| performance, design it to be very efficient. If it doesn't need
| to be high performance, just slap something together.
|
| As a developer, you should know how to design highly efficient
| apps, and highly performant apps, and how to develop quick and
| dirty, and how to design for scalability, depending on the
| situation. It's like being a construction worker: you're going to
| work on very different kinds of buildings in your career, so
| learn different techniques when you can.
|
| I highly recommend, _for fun_ , trying to develop some apps
| inside a VM with very limited resources. It's pretty neat to
| discover what the bottlenecks are and how to get around them. You
| may even learn more about networking, file i/o, virtual memory
| allocation, CoW, threading, etc. (I wouldn't use a container to
| start, as there's hidden performance issues that may be
| distraction)
| pjc50 wrote:
| Yup. I think HN skews surprisingly middle-aged now, and
| therefore many of us remember that era. You can do a _lot_ on a
| tiny server if you 're efficient.
| megous wrote:
| For a few years I did run my mail/web/... servers on a light
| virtualization host that billed by actual memory, disk and
| CPU use by minute. It's amazing what optimizations one finds
| to lower the resource consumption when it has direct effect
| on the price. At times I was running for $0.5/month :D
| aka878 wrote:
| A lot. I remember self-hosting VPN and cloud storage (OpenVPN and
| Nextcloud) at the same time on AWS for <= $5.
| jacooper wrote:
| You can get a better VPS with oracle Free tier, just make sure
| you have backups.
| altbdoor wrote:
| Signed up with a region, always out of any free availabilities,
| locked out with no way to change regions, unless if I sign up
| with a different email address.
| t344344 wrote:
| last time I checked, they required credit card, sort of "free
| trial" roulette
| pgm8705 wrote:
| Especially if you can run your stack on their Ampere
| processors. 4 vCPU and 24GB RAM... for free.
| ilitirit wrote:
| Also make sure you know how the pricing works. There's a
| specific configuration that enables 4 ARM CPUs, 24GB RAM, and
| 200GB disk space on the free tier.
| conductr wrote:
| The part I hate most is the security aspects. Keeping things up
| to date, port blocking, iptables, firewalls, etc. Anyone know if
| there's a SaaS that just ssh's in and does that stuff? I use
| serverpilot.io but it's aimed specifically at DO + PHP, and would
| like more flexibility on which core services could be installed.
| megous wrote:
| You don't need any firewall. All you need is to check `ss
| -ltunpr` and disable all services that are not listening on
| localhost, which is not usually many services on minimalistic
| OS installation. And/or make sure [your own] internal services
| listen only on localhost addresses.
|
| So that just leaves keeping things uptodate, which is easy by
| subscribing to your distro's security mailing list, and
| updating when something relevant comes up. Which is rarely on a
| simple webhost VM.
| d23 wrote:
| With respect to port blocking / iptables / firewalls, what do
| you need to do other than shut off all ports other than the
| one(s) you're serving on? And for updates, I don't know that
| any other provider does this any differently. You'll have to do
| some work, but that's what I'd prefer anyway; the last thing
| I'd want is AWS automatically upgrading the OS of live
| production systems without me testing it first.
| beambot wrote:
| > what do you need to do other than shut off all ports other
| than the one(s) you're serving on?
|
| A bit cheeky, but to highlight the point: you just locked
| yourself out of SSH.
| barrucadu wrote:
| Why would you block the port you're serving SSH on?
| conductr wrote:
| It's a good question and the answer is I don't know what I
| don't know when it comes to this stuff. Perhaps I've been
| overthinking it, but I feel like there's some gapping hole
| I'm leaving exposed. If that's all there is to it then I feel
| better already about a DIY approach. But for instance, SSH
| port has to remain open just so I can get in. I read
| occasionally about OpenSSH, or some foundational level
| service, being exploited. Is it common to just have to follow
| the security issues of every service and rush to patch
| accordingly, or is there something that helps automate this
| part?
|
| I do agree that there are some core services that I don't
| want changing out from under me without my notice/prior
| testing. But then there's also a lot of stuff installed that
| I don't use directly (eg OpenSSH) in my application and I'm
| not sure if those are attack vectors.
| stevenhuang wrote:
| The gist is, yes, that really is all there is to it.
|
| Setup unattended upgrades for your distro of choice, setup
| fail2ban, only make internet accessible the ports you need,
| upgrade out of date software (i.e., don't fall behind LTS).
| Make sure your software behaves with good security
| practices (don't trust user input, etc). Any modern guide
| these days should just about cover it.
|
| For more complex deployments you'll enter the world of
| reverse proxies, custom VLANs, automation abstraction,
| intrusion detection systems (i.e., applications that
| proactively monitor access logs for suspicious activity),
| logging systems, alerting systems...
|
| But for simple app deployments, getting a reasonably secure
| system setup is actually not that hard. Maintaining it and
| keeping it secure is another matter (keep private keys
| secret, don't use simple passwords for SSH, etc), dealing
| with large upgrades, don't deploy debug to prod...
| unethical_ban wrote:
| If you're talking host firewall, I would focus more on making
| sure only the necessary services are installed and configured
| for startup - meaning only authorized apps are listening
| inbound. For outbound, I don't have an answer, though I suspect
| there is one.
|
| For network, again, your required services should be somewhat
| easily definable for inbound unless you're hosting
| multimedia/UDP/P2P services. This is the basics... for
| enterprise level stuff you get into application-aware
| firewalls, IPS, and WAF.
| Tepix wrote:
| Do the initial setup with Ansible. It should be static unless
| your application changes. Also it's hard to do it as a service
| because it really depends on your applications.
|
| Keep the boxes up-to-date with "unattended-upgrades" or
| similar.
| RealStickman_ wrote:
| If you use additinal repos, make sure to add those to the
| unattended-upgrades config as well.
|
| And reboot your servers regularly.
| conductr wrote:
| Thanks, I'll check out Ansible
| kissgyorgy wrote:
| Vertical scaling is seriously underrated nowadays. Also everyone
| chases those 99.99999 availability, but very few actually need
| it, so scaling vertically is not a problem for 99.9% startups.
| elforce002 wrote:
| Vultr has $3.5 VPS and I'm loving it.
| hereforphone wrote:
| I just had a huge bad experience at vultr with 3 days of
| downtime and poor customer service. I tried to elevate it to
| the CTO but he ignored me.
| BilalBudhani wrote:
| is that ipv6 server only? If yes, I'm curious what do you use
| it for?
| elforce002 wrote:
| They have $2.5 VPS IPv6 only. The other one has IPv4.
| redman25 wrote:
| You could use it for a publicly accessible static ip for vpn,
| ssh, etc. I have an ipv4 one from before those instances went
| ipv6 only.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| Can also recommend Vultr. Been using them for years now with no
| complaints.
| tgtweak wrote:
| Putting my recommendation in for vultr - have used them for many
| years and have had very good results off of a cheap vps. Also
| trivial to migrate and upgrade hosts on the fly.
|
| Someone had a site set up to measure VPS providers by running a
| suite of tests every hour and collecting the results by hosting
| provider. Was surprising to see transient performance
| degradations, downtimes and stark differences in performance for
| "2 vcpu 1gb ram" depending on the hardware underneath and level
| of overprovisioning.
|
| Edit: the aptly named https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/screener
| bdcravens wrote:
| Derek Sivers was recently on the Remote Ruby podcast, and he
| also had good things to say about Vultr.
| hereforphone wrote:
| I used Johnscompanies, Linode, DigitalOcean, then Vultr. Vultr
| shocked me by how poor their customer service was, after 3 days
| of downtime, multiple claims of fixing the issue soon, and not
| bothering to notify me when it finally was fixed. I didn't
| experience that at any of my previous hosts.
| tgtweak wrote:
| Yeah the CS isn't excellent but it is mostly for self-
| supported workloads.
|
| Like OVH - if you need support for anything beyond
| provisioning/troubleshooting things outside of the VM, it's
| not the best choice.
|
| If you compare it with ec2 support costs + vm costs... it's
| difficult to have it all.
|
| Digital Ocean does a good job of support too, but I'd rather
| not need support (with most tooling self-serve) than have
| support but have issues. I've had VMs at vultr running for 3+
| years with very few issues (one host migration which they did
| "live" for me and notified me a few days in advance). I've
| had more issues with degraded instances in ec2 that require a
| ticket sent to ec2 support and 3-days wait for them to assign
| it to a new host.
| wrycoder wrote:
| Johncompanies
|
| http://www.johncompanies.com/
| hereforphone wrote:
| It's been so long I forgot. Formed by former LoD from what
| I remember.
| megous wrote:
| Do they still disallow you to run your own kernel? (I guess I'm
| confusing them with scaleway...)
| ec109685 wrote:
| These test results are surprising. In my experience, when the
| server cpu is pegged, it causes latency to shoot through the roof
| unless the number of parallel requests is finely tuned.
|
| In this case, there are max 50 workers hitting the server, so
| you'd expect 50 parallel requests to be outstanding at once. 1300
| req/sec with 50 workers, would be 26 msec/req, which matched the
| results.
|
| So I wonder why the server being pegged didn't affect things
| more? Super curious what the server side metrics were during the
| test.
| ec109685 wrote:
| I guess one explanation is that given the load test isn't
| sending constant traffic but each virtual user instead waits
| for each request before sending the next one, it naturally
| starts throttling.
|
| Constant Load, which k6 supports, can help pinpoint the
| server's breaking point.
| zer0tonin wrote:
| Yes this is a valid point. I didn't think of using constant
| load at the time of writing the article.
| lizknope wrote:
| My VPS is $1.67 a month from buyvm.net
|
| I run a web server with family photo albums that are all static
| pages.
|
| My friends and I use it to exchange files.
|
| I also use it as a SSH reverse tunnel relay to access my home
| machine from outside.
|
| I don't really need to do anything else and it works well for
| that.
| shiftpgdn wrote:
| ipv4 addresses are approaching $50-60 per address. The days of
| cheap ipv4 vpses is almost over.
| kccqzy wrote:
| I believe the price you are quoting is for buying an address.
| When you rent a VPS you are only renting an address.
| shiftpgdn wrote:
| How could a company make any money renting an IPv4 address
| for $1-2/month when it cost them $50 for the address.
| kccqzy wrote:
| How could a landlord make any money renting a house for
| $3000/month when it cost them $1000000 to buy the house.
| shiftpgdn wrote:
| At current interest rates they wouldn't if they had to
| take out a loan for the house. That's my point. It's not
| profitable even on a 5 year return window.
| dolmen wrote:
| So what about cheap IPv6 only VPS?
| samsquire wrote:
| I'm a devops engineer and I would prefer not have to worry about
| scaling or unexpected costs from the provider.
|
| My dream SAAS or cloud company is one that does payments and
| revenue to resource scaling. They integrate your payments
| solution of customers to scalability of your infrastructure.
|
| In other words, the more active customers you have the more
| capacity you have. They would handle all the payments collection
| and take a cut of your revenue.
|
| The guarantee is that you can handle any number of customers
| based on the number of paying customers.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| The ideal model might be customer pays for hosting direct from
| the cloud provider then buys your app service as an add on
| install.
|
| Sound crazy? Same principle has worked since the 80s: the
| personal computer!
| wnolens wrote:
| But then it's static while transactions aren't occurring. This
| only makes sense to me in a system in which the load IS a
| transaction like a payment gateway, or a strict single tenant
| architecture. You're not gonna scale when a customer bursts
| because they didn't know enough in advance to pay you before?
| samsquire wrote:
| I assumed that the provider of said service would have
| profoundly scalable systems that can absorb load fast,
| similar to AWS Lambda and Firecracker VMs.
| bob1029 wrote:
| I think the biggest thing that snipes a lot of technology teams
| is some notion that production can _never ever go down no matter
| what_. Every byte must be synchronously replicated to 2+ cross-
| cloud regions, etc. Not a single customer can ever become
| impacted by a hacker, DDOS, or other attack.
|
| Anyone in this industry is prone to these absolutist ideologies.
| I wasted a half-decade chasing perfection myself. In reality,
| there are very few real world systems that _cannot_ go down. One
| example of a "cannot fail" I'd provide is debit & credit
| processing networks. The DoD operates most of the other examples.
|
| The most skilled developer will look at a 100% uptime guarantee,
| laugh for a few moments, and then spin up an email to the
| customer in hopes of better understanding the nature of their
| business. We've been able to negotiate a substantially smaller
| operational footprint with all of our customers by being
| realistic with the nature and impact of failure.
|
| If you can negotiate to operate your product on a single VM
| (ideally with the database being hosted on the same box), then
| you should absolutely do this and take the win. Even if you think
| you'll have to rewrite due to scale in the future, this will get
| you to the future.
|
| Periodic, crash-consistent snapshots of block storage devices is
| a completely valid backup option. Many times it is perfectly OK
| to lose data. In most cases, you will need to reach a small
| compromise with the business owner where you develop an actual
| product feature to compensate for failure modes. An example of
| this for us would be emailing of important items to a special
| mailbox for recovery from a back-office perspective. The amount
| of time it took to develop this small product feature is not even
| .01% of the amount of time it would have taken to develop a
| multi-cloud, explosion-proof product.
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