[HN Gopher] I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousan...
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I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars
Author : sebnun
Score : 464 points
Date : 2025-11-04 21:22 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (rameerez.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (rameerez.com)
| ranger_danger wrote:
| Sorry but my $3 AWS instance is still cheaper than all of those
| options.
|
| If you need a lot of, well, anything, be it compute, memory,
| storage, bandwidth etc., of course cloud stuff is going to be
| more expensive... but if you don't need that, then IMO $3/mo on-
| demand pricing really can't be beat when I don't have to maintain
| any equipment myself. Oracle also offers perpetually free VM
| instances if you don't mind the glow.
| kelnos wrote:
| With a quick LLM-assisted search, looks like the cheapest EC2
| instance is t4g.micro, which comes in at $2.04/mo. It has 2
| vCPUs and and only 512MiB of RAM. (I assume that doesn't
| include disk; EBS will be extra.)
|
| I can certainly see a use for that small amount of compute &
| RAM, but it's not clear that your level of needs is common.
| I've been paying for a $16/mo VPS (not on AWS) for about 15
| years. It started out at $9/mo, but I've upgraded it since then
| as my needs have grown. It's not super beefy with 2 vCPUs, 5GiB
| of RAM, and 60GiB of disk space (with free data
| ingress/egress), but it does the job, even if I could probably
| find it cheaper elsewhere.
|
| But not at Amazon. Closest match is probably a t3.medium, with
| 2 vCPUs and 4GiB RAM. Add a 60GiB gp2 EBS volume, and it costs
| around $35/mo, and that's not including data transfer.
|
| The point that you're missing is we're not looking for the
| cheapest thing ever, we're looking for the cheapest thing that
| meets requirements. For many (most?) applications, you're going
| to overpay (sometimes by orders of magnitude) for AWS.
|
| You say "if you need a lot", but "lot" is doing a bit of work
| there. My needs are super modest, certainly not "a lot", and
| AWS is by far not the cheapest option.
| pfych wrote:
| I run heaps of services on AWS and my bill is ~$2-3 - I'm not
| running any EC2 instances at all. Some of the offerings these
| cloud providers offer are extremely affordable if you know
| how to play your cards right and use the right services.
| observationist wrote:
| Just get a raspberry pi and run it from your own home internet.
| You should already be paying for a VPN service and your regular
| internet service, so you should be able to trivially work out a
| self-hosted solution. You'll recover your costs inside of two
| years and come out the other end better off for it.
|
| Don't give the big cloud companies an inch if you don't
| absolutely have to. The internet needs and deserves the
| participation of independent people putting up their own
| services and systems.
|
| Amazon really doesn't care if your $10,000 bed folds up on you
| like a sandwich and cooks you when AWS us-east-1 goes down, or
| stops your smart toilet from flushing, or sets bucket defaults
| that allow trivial public access to information you assume to
| be secure, because nobody in their right mind would just leave
| things wide open.
|
| Each and every instance of someone doing something
| independently takes money and control away from big
| corporations that don't deserve it, and it makes your life
| better. You could run pihole and a slew of other useful
| utilities on your self-hosted server that benefit anyone
| connected to your network.
|
| AI can trivially walk you through building your own self-hosted
| setups (or even set things up for you if you entrust it with an
| automation MCP.)
|
| Oracle and AWS and Alphabet and the rest shouldn't profit from
| eating the internet - the whole world becomes a better place
| every time you deny them your participation in the endless
| enshittification of everything.
| selectively wrote:
| Idiotic piece - the purpose of 'the cloud' is to scale large
| demand applications. Rental hardware can't really do that.
| stevage wrote:
| An argument which begins by reducing an entire industry down to
| a single "purpose" is not convincing.
| pmontra wrote:
| The post is about that 99% of companies that will never go
| large scale. Its point is that they don't need cloud, buying a
| server or two is all they need.
| kelnos wrote:
| The vast majority of businesses are not "large demand
| applications".
|
| > _Idiotic piece_
|
| That's unnecessary; please don't do that here. Weird that you
| created an account just to post an unsubstantive comment.
| gitaarik wrote:
| You can automate scaling rental hardware too
| kryptiskt wrote:
| I once worked at a bookmaker with millions of customers where
| they had extreme reliability demands during very popular
| events, since any bets that the punters couldn't place during
| live betting was lost money. They had one massive server with a
| big pipe and an identical hot spare in another location. It
| worked very well for them. That was a decade ago, you can get
| even bigger servers these days, there's a lot of room for
| scaling without needing to go beyond one machine.
| birdman3131 wrote:
| As a note hetzner has a lot of auction servers and I believe they
| lack the setup fee
| ranger_danger wrote:
| They have also threatened to cancel my account more than once
| because I typed "ipfs daemon".
|
| https://github.com/ipfs/kubo/issues/10327
|
| https://discuss.ipfs.tech/t/moved-ipfs-node-result-netscan-d...
|
| >This happens with Hetzner all the time because they have no
| VLANs and all customers are on a single LAN and IPFS tries to
| discover other nodes in the same LAN by default.
| selectively wrote:
| Hetzner is also sinkholed by lots of EDR products because
| they host a _ton_ of malicious garbage. They are a bad actor.
| majorchord wrote:
| Why is it their job to be the arbiters of what customers
| are allowed to do on their platform?
| rs186 wrote:
| To be fair, most hosting platforms have those in T&S,
| some even explicitly say you can't torrent pirated movies
| and even monitor your activities.
| kiwijamo wrote:
| Same as AWS. I've added quite a few AWS ip ranges to my
| firewall.
| fcpk wrote:
| yet another obsessive take on "cloud is bad and expensive" eh? I
| think they vastly forget the value of some SaaS offerings in
| terms of time saving for small companies. running and managing
| numerous DBs, k8s clusters, ci/cd pipelines and stateless
| container systems is simply impossible with a team of 1-2 people.
| sure if the setup is simple and only requires a few classic
| components, this is way cheaper and for a 99.9% SLA will work
| fine. otherwise it only makes sense if you had very large cloud
| bills and can dedicate multiple engineers to the newly created
| tasks.
| 1dom wrote:
| Not agreeing/disagreeing with your core point, but this doesn't
| seem right:
|
| > running and managing numerous DBs, k8s clusters, ci/cd
| pipelines and stateless container systems is simply impossible
| with a team of 1-2 people.
|
| That's a medium to large homelab worth of stuff, which means it
| can be run by a single nerd in their spare time.
| Atreiden wrote:
| Homelab =/= Production systems
|
| The gulf between these two insofar as what approach,
| technologies, and due-diligences are necessary is vast.
| kelnos wrote:
| I think we've gone a little nuts defining "production
| system" these days. I've worked for companies with zero-
| downtime deployments and quite a lot of redundancy for high
| availability, and for some applications it's definitely
| worthwhile.
|
| But I think for many (most?) businesses, one nine is just
| fine. That's perfectly doable by one person, even if you
| want, say, >=96% uptime, which allows for 350 hours of
| downtime per year. Even two nines allows for ~88 hours of
| downtime per year, and one person could manage that without
| much trouble.
|
| Most businesses aren't global. Downtime outside regular
| business hours for your timezone (and perhaps one or two
| zones to the west and east of you) is usually not much of a
| problem, especially if you're running a small B2B service.
|
| For a small business that runs on 1-3 servers (probably
| very common!), keeping a hot spare for each server (or
| perhaps a single server that runs all services in a lower-
| supported-traffic mode) can be a simple way to keep your
| uptime high without having to spend too much time or money.
| And people don't have to completely opt out of the cloud;
| there are affordable options for e.g. managed RDBMS hosting
| that can make maintenance and incident response
| significantly easier and might be a good choice, depending
| on your needs.
|
| (Source: I'm building a small one-person business that is
| going to work this way, and I've been doing my research and
| gaming it out.)
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| One thing that AWS, Google and Azure do that your own
| systems don't is release their updates whenever it suits
| them, often taking down your business down in the middle
| of the day with their own problems. You can't fix it, you
| can't rollback what you just did and get back up and
| running you just have to sit and wait.
|
| That is quite different to a business that turns off its
| boxes for an hour at 0100 Sunday morning to do updates
| and release new software. The downtime isn't equivalent
| because it really matters when it is and if that hurts
| your use case or not. Your own system might be down for
| more hours a year than AWS, but its not down Monday to
| Friday on an evening when you do most your sales because
| you refuse to touch anything during that period and do
| all the work outside that and schedule your updates.
| immibis wrote:
| It also feels like AWS (or Azure) isn't really that much
| more reliable than your own thing. But half the internet
| is down at the same time so you don't get blamed as much.
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| Its the "No one gets blamed for going IBM" thing in the
| modern era. They are making it someone elses fault and
| absolves the blame. The problem is if your competitor is
| still up you could be loosing customers on average mid
| day outage, even if they are down for 3x as long its not
| when it matters.
| 1dom wrote:
| I agree. "production system" isn't a useful term without
| context.
|
| Either it's production system in the context of "it's a
| business serving customers", in which case, there are
| many homelabs out there which have received paying
| traffic, or it's a production system in terms of
| functionality, downtime, technical features etc. Again,
| there are many homelabs out there that can tick all the
| same technical and performance boxes as "production
| system".
|
| In the context of the original comment I was responding
| to ("...running and managing numerous DBs, k8s clusters,
| ci/cd pipelines and stateless container systems is simply
| impossible with a team of 1-2 people.") you're more
| evidence for my comment that it's perfectly possible for
| 1 - 2 people to run a small production system, just as
| it's possible for 1 nerd to run a medium - large homelab
| with the same technical features.
| 1dom wrote:
| Your production is not my production. 5 9's of businesses
| don't need 5 9's, and in my experience, people who talk
| like they do are talking from a position of managing 1 or 2
| production systems in a single domain.
|
| My experience is that the largest regulated production
| systems I've run have clearly been larger and more complex
| than my homelab, but my homelab has been significantly more
| resilient, featureful and robust than many of the smaller
| production systems I've been responsible for outside of
| regulated domains.
| immibis wrote:
| > running and managing numerous DBs, k8s clusters, ci/cd
| pipelines and stateless container systems is simply impossible
| with a team of 1-2 people
|
| Then don't. If your team and budget are small enough not to
| hire a sysadmin, then your workload is (almost certainly) small
| enough to fit on one server, one Postgres database, Jenkins or
| a bash script, and certainly no k8s.
| grimblee wrote:
| I'm sorry but whereever I've seen aws at work there was a
| sprawling terraform codebase to manage it. This no different
| than puppet or ansible on bare metal complexoty-wise, you just
| pat extra for the shiny tools
| pbalau wrote:
| The cloud is a good idea. It becomes a bad idea when it is the
| only thing you know or, most likely, is the only cloud you know.
| stevage wrote:
| The first couple of paragraphs of price comparisons are useful.
| Then there are many paragraphs of sheer waffle. The author
| doesn't even seem able to define what "the cloud" is:
|
| > The whole debate of "is this still the cloud or not" is
| nonsense to me. You're just getting lost in naming conventions.
| VPS, bare metal, on-prem, colo, who cares what you call it. You
| need to put your servers somewhere. Sure, have a computer running
| in your mom's basement if that makes you feel like you're exiting
| the cloud more, I'll have mine in a datacenter and both will be
| happy.
| kazinator wrote:
| The cheap hosting service they switched to is arguably "cloud".
|
| If you can't drive to the location where your stuff is running,
| and then enter the building blindfolded, yet put your hands on
| the correct machine, then it's cloud.
| charlieflowers wrote:
| I read the whole thing and I didn't see any waffle. Sure,
| undeniably some excess word count, some emotion in responding
| to critics. But no waffle.
|
| The "is this cloud or not" debate in the piece makes perfect
| sense. Who cares whether Hetzner is defined as "the cloud" or
| not? The point is, he left AWS without going to Azure or some
| other obvious cloud vendor. He took a step towards more hands
| on management. And he saved a ton of money.
| kkapelon wrote:
| > He took a step towards more hands on management. And he
| saved a ton of money.
|
| Then the article should be titled as
|
| "Send this article to your friend who still thinks that AWS
| is a good idea"
|
| or
|
| "Save costs by taking a step towards more hands on
| management"
|
| or
|
| "How I saved money moving from AWS to Hetzner"
| fred_is_fred wrote:
| I think a lot of teams using cloud are using SaaS rather than
| IaaS. They want a redis and a postgres and a S3 and a ... You can
| set all that up on a server, but it's not very fun if you've
| never done it before.
| jkhall81 wrote:
| Vercel is my favorite.. They charge you to pay for AWS.
| mnw21cam wrote:
| I have a VPS. It costs me PS1.34 per month. It's way over-powered
| for what I need it for.
|
| However, one situation where I think the cloud might be useful is
| for archive storage. I did a comparison between AWS Glacier Deep
| Storage and local many-hard-drive boxes, for storing PB-scale
| backups, and AWS just squeaked in as slightly cheaper, but only
| because you only pay for the amount you use, whereas if you buy a
| box then you have to pay for the unused space. And it's off-site,
| which is a resilience advantage. And the defrosting/downloading
| charge was acceptable at effectively 2.5 months worth of storage.
| However, at smaller scales you would probably win with a small
| NAS, and at larger scales you'd be able to set up a tape library
| and fairly comprehensively beat AWS for price.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| Yeah, but in 800 months you'd come out ahead with a dedicated
| server in your closet.
| ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote:
| I run a tiny local dedicated server 24/7 that consumes around
| 10W on average, which is about $2/mo in electricity costs
| where I live.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| I meant the upfront cost of the machine.
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| Its a weird service because before that point AWS is crazy
| expensive for storage, especially down in the TB range its
| awful value compared to your box and drives. But once you get
| into that PB scale AWS actually seems to be competitive, I
| guess because the GB/TBs they are selling are from PB scale
| solutions and all the overhead that entails.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| I dislike those black and white takes a lot. It's absolutely true
| that most startups that just run an EC2 instance will save a lot
| of cash going to Hetzner, Linode, Digital Ocean or whatever. I do
| host at Hetzner myself and so do a lot of my clients.
|
| That being said, the cloud does have a lot of advantages:
|
| - You're getting a lot of services readily available. Need
| offsite backups? A few clicks. Managed database? A few clicks.
| Multiple AZs? Available in seconds.
|
| - You're not paying up-front costs (vs. investing hundreds of
| dollars for buying server hardware) and everything is available
| _right now_ [0]
|
| - Peak-heavy loads can be a lot cheaper. Mostly irrelevant for
| you average compute load, but things are quite different if you
| need to train an LLM
|
| - Many services are already certified according to all kinds of
| standards, which can be very useful depending on your customers
|
| Also, engineering time and time in general can be expensive. If
| you are a solo entrepreneur or a slow growth company, you have a
| lot of engineering time for basically free. But in a quick growth
| or prototyping phase, not to speak of venture funding, things can
| be quite different. Buying engineering time for >150EUR/hour can
| quickly offset a lot of saving [1].
|
| Does this apply to most companies? No. Obviously not. But the
| cloud is not too expensive - you're paying for stuff you don't
| need. That's an entirely different kind of error.
|
| [0] Compared to the rack hosting setup described in the post.
| Hetzner, Linode, etc. do provide multiple AZs with dedicated
| servers.
|
| [1] Just to be fair, debugging cloud errors can be time
| consuming, too, and experienced AWS engineers will not be
| cheaper. But an RDS instance with solid backups-equivalent will
| usually not amortize quickly, if you need to pay someone to set
| it up.
| winddude wrote:
| linode was better and had cheaper pricing before being bought
| by akamai
| mcmcmc wrote:
| Whoa, an acquisition made things worse for everyone but the
| people who cashed out? Crazy, who could have seen that coming
| presentation wrote:
| Guess you came for the hot take without actually using the
| service or participating in any intelligent conversation.
| All the sibling comments observe that nothing you are
| talking about happened.
|
| Snarky ignorant comments like yours ruin Hacker News and
| the internet as a whole. Please reconsider your mindset for
| the good of us all.
| jonway wrote:
| Akamai has some really good infrastructure, and an extremely
| competent global cdn and interconnects. I was skeptical when
| linode was acquired, but I value their top-tier peering and
| decent DDoS mitigation which is rolled into the cost.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I don't feel like anything really changed? Fairly certain the
| prices haven't changed. It's honestly been pleasantly stable.
| I figured I'd have to move after a few months, but we're a
| few years into the acquisition and everything still works.
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| I concur with every word.
| busterarm wrote:
| No longer getting DDOSed multiple years in a row on Christmas
| Eve is worth whatever premium Akamai wants to charge over old
| Linode.
| tbeseda wrote:
| > But the cloud is not too expensive - you're paying for stuff
| you don't need. That's an entirely different kind of error.
|
| Agreed. These sort of takedowns usually point to a gap in the
| author's experience. Which is totally fine! Missing knowledge
| is an opportunity. But it's not a good look when the
| opportunity is used for ragebait, hustlr.
| zigzag312 wrote:
| > A few clicks.
|
| Getting through AWS documentation can be fairly time consuming.
| JuniperMesos wrote:
| And making sure you're not making a security configuration
| mistake that will accidentally leak private data to the open
| internet because of a detail of AWS you were unaware of.
| hughw wrote:
| gotta say, Amazon Q can do the details for you in many cases.
| rtpg wrote:
| Figuring out how to do db backups _can_ also be fairly time
| consuming.
|
| There's a question of whether you want to spend time learning
| AWS or spend time learning your DB's hand-rolled backup
| options (on top of the question of whether learning AWS's
| thing even absolves you of understanding your DB's internals
| anyways!)
|
| I do think there's value in "just" doing a thing instead of
| relying on the wrapper. Whether that's easier or not is super
| context and experience dependent, though.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Figuring out how to do db backups _can_ also be fairly
| time consuming.
|
| apt install automysqlbackup autopostgresqlbackup
|
| Though if you have proper filesystem snapshots then they
| should always see your database as consistent, right? So
| you can even skip database tools and just learn to make and
| download snapshots.
| ngc248 wrote:
| nah filesystem snapshots may not lead to consistent DB
| backups. DB backup software usually use a plugin to tell
| the DB to coalesce data before taking a snapshot.
| baq wrote:
| At least one OS you've heard of can quiesce the file
| system to allow taking a consistent snapshot; I'd be
| surprised if this wasn't widely available everywhere.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Databases have to be ready for power loss, don't they?
| They might not be happy about it, but if that corrupts
| anything then the design has failed.
|
| And again I'll emphasize proper snapshot, cutting off
| writes at an exact point in time. A normal file copy
| cannot safely back up an active database.
| enronmusk wrote:
| > filesystem snapshots may not lead to consistent DB
| backups
|
| Only if your database files are split across multiple
| file systems, which is atypical.
| anotherevan wrote:
| Hmmm, I think you have to figure out how to do your
| database backups anyway as trying to get a restorable
| backup _out_ of RDS to use on another provider seems to be
| a difficult task.
|
| Backups that are stored with the same provider are good,
| providing the provider is reliable as a whole.
|
| (Currently going through the disaster recovery exercise of,
| "What if AWS decided they didn't like us and nuked our
| account from orbit.")
| bdangubic wrote:
| aws would never do that :) plus you can also do it in aws
| with like 75 clicks around UI which makes no sense even
| when you are tripping on acid
| happymellon wrote:
| > 75 clicks
|
| Well 2 commands... aws rds export-task
| create \ --source-arn <SnapshotArn> \
| --s3-bucket-name <Bucket> \ --iam-role-arn <Role>
|
| Then copy it down aws s3 cp \ <S3
| Location> \ <Local Dir> --recursive
|
| The biggest effort would be then running the Apache
| Parquet to CSV tool on it.
| darkwater wrote:
| Plus the s3 bucket creation and definition commands, and
| the IAM role and attached policy commands. If you do all
| in the webUI it's not going to be 75 clicks either but 30
| for sure.
| happymellon wrote:
| It could easily be 30 clicks.
|
| But creating an S3 bucket, an IAM role and attaching
| policies isn't 30 commands.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Those buckets and IAM policies and roles also have to be
| managed.
|
| There are also turnkeys solutions that allow one to spin
| up a DB, setup replication and backups inside or outside
| of big cnoud vendors. That is the point of db kubernetes
| operators for instance.
| bdangubic wrote:
| most definitely do not want to spend time learning aws...
| would rather learn about typewriter maintenance
| fulafel wrote:
| And learning TypeScript and CDK, if we're comparing scripted,
| repeatable setups which you should be doing from the start.
| sofixa wrote:
| > repeatable setups which you should be doing from the
| start
|
| Yes, but not with
|
| > TypeScript and CDK
|
| Unless your business includes managing infrastructure with
| your product, for whatever reason (like you provision EC2
| instances for your customers and that's all you do), there
| is no reason to shoot yourself in the foot with a fully
| fledged programming language for something that needs to be
| as stable as infrastructure. The saying is Infrastructure
| _as_ Code, not _with_ code. Even assuming you need to learn
| Terraform from scratch but already know Typescript, you
| would still save you time compared to learning CDK,
| figuring out what is possisble with it, and debugging
| issues down the line.
| fulafel wrote:
| I think declarative is nicer too, but choosing a non
| mainstream tech here takes self-confidence in the matter
| that inexperienced AWSers are unlikely to have.
|
| And learning something arguably better, like
| Cloudformation / Terraform / SST, is still a hurdle.
| dabockster wrote:
| You're literally playing into what the author is criticizing.
| John23832 wrote:
| You don't actually need any of those things until you no longer
| have a "project", but a business which will allow you to pay
| for the things you require.
|
| You'd be amazed by how far you can get with a home linux box
| and cloudflare tunnels.
| fragmede wrote:
| You can get quite far without that box, even, and just use
| Cloudflare R2 as free static hosting.
| selcuka wrote:
| CloudFlare Pages is even easier for static hosting with
| automatic GitHub pulls.
| jen729w wrote:
| Happy Netlify customer here, same deal. $0.
|
| (LOL 'customer'. But the point is, when the day comes,
| I'll be happy to give them money.)
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Careful what you wish for. Netlify sent a guy a $104k
| bill from the free plan. Thankfully social media outage
| saved the guy.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39520776
| ascorbic wrote:
| Netlify changed their pricing after that so that free
| accounts are always free.
| franciscop wrote:
| Could you give a reference please? I was literally going
| to recommend Netlify at work, but didn't after I saw that
| story.
| fvdessen wrote:
| FYI I just migrated from Netlify to Cloudflare pages and
| Cloudflare is massively faster across all metrics.
| koito17 wrote:
| On this site, I've seen these kind of takes repeatedly over
| the past years, so I went ahead and built a little forum that
| consists of a single Rust binary and SQLite. The binary runs
| on a Mac Mini in my bedroom with Cloudflare tunnels. I get
| continuous backups with Litestream, and testing backups is as
| trivial as running `litestream restore` on my development
| machine and then running the binary.
|
| Despite some pages issuing up to 8 database queries, I
| haven't seen responses take more than about 4 - 5 ms to
| generate. Since I have 16 GB of RAM to spare, I just let
| SQLite mmap the whole the database and store temp tables in
| RAM. I can further optimize the backend by e.g. replacing
| Tera with Askama and optimizing the SQL queries, but the
| easiest win for latency is to just run the binary in a VPS
| close to my users. However, the current setup works so well
| that I just see no point to changing what little
| "infrastructure" I've built. The other cool thing is the fact
| that the backend + litestream uses at most ~64 MB of RAM.
| Plenty of compute and RAM to spare.
|
| It's also neat being able to allocate a few cores on the same
| machine to run self-hosted GitHub actions, so you can have
| the same machine doing CI checks, rebuilding the binary, and
| restarting the service. Turns out the base model M4 is really
| fast at compiling code compared to just about every single
| cloud computer I've ever used at previous jobs.
| busterarm wrote:
| Just one of the couple dozen databases we run for our
| product in the dev environment alone is over 12 TB.
|
| How could I not use the cloud?
| n3t wrote:
| What's your cloud bill?
| wheybags wrote:
| https://www.seagate.com/products/enterprise-
| drives/exos/exos...
| selcuka wrote:
| > one of the couple dozen databases
|
| I guess this is one of those use cases that justify the
| cloud. It's hard to host that reliably at home.
| c0balt wrote:
| Not too push the point too hard, but a "dev environment"
| for a product is for a business (not an individual
| consumer). Having a server (rack) in an office is not
| that hard, but alas the cloud might be better here for
| ease of administration.
| mcny wrote:
| My understanding is that aws exists because we can't get
| any purchase approved in under three months.
| darkwater wrote:
| I don't think so. An organization so big and bureaucratic
| that needs 3 months to authorize a server purchase will
| for sure need a few weeks of paperwork to authorize a new
| AWS account creation, and will track the spending for OU
| and will cut budget and usage if they think you deserve
| it.
| wongarsu wrote:
| And plenty of datacenters will be happy to give you some
| space in one of their racks.
|
| Not wanting to deal with backups or HA are decent reasons
| to put a database in the cloud (as long as you are aware
| how much you are overpaying). Not having a good place to
| put the server is not a good reason
| immibis wrote:
| If anyone's curious about the ballpark cost, a carrier-
| owned (?) DC near me that publishes prices (most don't)
| advertises a full rack for 650EUR per month, including
| internet @ 20TB/month @ 1 Gbps, and 1kW power.
|
| Though both of which are probably less than you'd need if
| you needed a full of rack of space, which I assume is
| part of the reason that pricing is almost always "contact
| us". I did not bother getting a quote just for the
| purpose of this comment. But another thing that people
| need to be less afraid of, when they're looking to
| actually spend a few digits of money and not just comment
| about it, is asking for quotes.
| koito17 wrote:
| 12 TB fits entirely into the RAM of a 2U server (cf. Dell
| PowerEdge R840).
|
| However, I think there's an implicit point in TFA;
| namely, that your personal and side projects are not
| scaling to a 12 TB database.
|
| With that said, I do manage approximately 14 TB of
| storage in a RAIDZ2 at my home, for "Linux ISOs". The I/O
| performance is "good enough" for streaming video and
| BitTorrent seeding.
|
| However, I am not sure what your latency requirements and
| access patterns are. If you are mostly _reading_ from the
| 12 TB database and don 't have specific latency
| requirements on writes, then I don't see why the cloud is
| a hard requirement? To the contrary, most cloud providers
| provide remarkably low IOPS in their block storage
| offerings. Here is an example of Oracle Cloud's block
| storage for 12 TB: Max Throughput: 480
| MB/s Max IOPS: 25,000
|
| https://docs.oracle.com/en-
| us/iaas/Content/Block/Concepts/bl...
|
| Those are the kind of numbers I would expect of a budget
| SATA SSD, not "NVMe-based storage infrastructure".
| Additionally, the cost for 12 TB in this storage class is
| ~$500/mo. That's roughly the cost of two 14 TB hard
| drives in a mirror vdev on ZFS (not that this is a good
| idea btw).
|
| This leads me to guess most people will prefer a managed
| database offering rather than deploying their own
| database on top of a cloud provider's block storage. But
| 12 TB of data in the gp3 storage class of RDS costs about
| $1,400/mo. That is already triple the cost of the NAS in
| my bedroom.
|
| Lastly, backing up 12 TB to Backblaze B2 is about
| $180/mo. Given that this database is for your dev
| environment, I am assuming that backup requirements are
| simple (i.e. 1 off-site backup).
|
| The key point, however, is that most people's side
| projects are unlikely to scale to a 12 TB dev environment
| database.
|
| Once you're at that scale, sure, consider the cloud. But
| even at the largest company I worked at, a 14 TB hard
| drive was enough storage (and IOPS) for on-prem installs
| of the product. The product was an NLP-based application
| that automated due diligence for M&As. The storage costs
| were mostly full-text search indices on collections of
| tens of thousands of legal documents, each document could
| span hundreds to thousands of pages. The backups were as
| simple as having a second 14 TB hard drive around and
| periodically checking the data isn't corrupt.
| busterarm wrote:
| Still missing the point. This is just one server and just
| in the dev enviornment?
|
| How many pets do you want to be tending to? I have 10^5
| servers I'm responsible for...
|
| The quantity and methods the cloud affords me allow me to
| operate the same infrastructure with 1/10th as much
| labor.
|
| At the extreme ends of scale this isn't a benefit, but
| for large companies in the middle this is the only move
| that makes any sense.
|
| 99% of posts I read talking about how easy and cheap it
| is to be in the datacenter all have a single digit number
| of racks worth of stuff. Often far less.
|
| We operate physical datacenters as well. We spend
| multiple millions in the cloud per month. We just moved
| another full datacenter into the cloud and the difference
| in cost between the two is less than $50k/year. Running
| in physical DCs is really inefficient for us for a long
| of annoying and insurmountable reasons. And we no longer
| have to deal with procurement and vendor management. My
| engineers can focus their energy on more valuable things.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| Why do people think it takes "labor" to have a server up
| and running?
|
| Multiple millions in the cloud per month?
|
| You could build a room full of giant servers and pay
| multiple people for a year just on your monthly server
| bill.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| What is this ridiculous bait and switch. First you talk
| about a 12 TB dev databases and "How could I not use the
| cloud?". And you rightfully get challenged on that and
| then suddenly it's about the number of servers you have
| to manage and you don't have the energy to do that with
| your team. Those two have nothing to do with each other.
| jamesnorden wrote:
| Found the "AWS certified cloud engineer".
| sgarland wrote:
| First of all, if you have a dev DB that's 12 TB, I can
| practically guarantee that it is tremendously
| unoptimized.
|
| But also, that's extremely easily handled with physical
| servers - there are NVMe drives that are 10x as large.
| fx1994 wrote:
| that's what I always brag to my devs, why is our DB 1TB,
| and only 20 users are working in our app. They are
| collecting all garbage and saving it to DB. Poor
| development skills I would say. Our old app did the same
| thing, and after 15 years it was barely 100GB with tens
| of users. devs today are SELECT *. If it does not work,
| they say we need more resources. Thats why I hate cloud.
| dublinben wrote:
| 12 TB is easy. https://yourdatafitsinram.net/
| Aeolun wrote:
| Buy a pretty basic HDD? These days 12 TB isn't all that
| much?
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| what are you doing that you have 12TB in dev??? my
| startup isn't even using a TB in production and we hands
| multiple millions of dollars in transactions every month.
| maccard wrote:
| 12TB is $960/month in gp3 storage alone. You can buy 12TB
| of NVMe storage for less than $960, and it will be orders
| of magnitude faster than AWS.
|
| Your use case is the _worst_ use case for the cloud.
| pnutjam wrote:
| The most consistent misunderstanding I see about the
| cloud, is disk I/O. Nobody understands how slow your
| standard cloud disk is under load. They see good
| performance and assume that will always be the case. They
| don't realize that most cloud disks use a form of token
| tracking where they build up I/O over time and if you
| have bursts or sustained high I/O load you will very
| quickly notice that your disk speeds are garbage.
|
| For some reason people more easily understand the limits
| of CPU and memory, but overlook disk constantly.
| anktor wrote:
| What could I read to inform myself better on this topic?
| It is true I had not seen this angle before
| pnutjam wrote:
| This looks pretty informative. The terminology can be
| hard to follow.
| https://medium.com/@bounouh.fedi/understanding-iops-in-
| aws-w...
|
| I/O is hard to benchmark so it's often ignored since you
| can just scale up your disks. It's a common gotcha in the
| cloud. It's not a show stopper, but it blows up the
| savings you might be expecting.
| immibis wrote:
| At one time I had a project to run a cryptocurrency node
| for BSC (this is basically a fork of Ethereum with all
| the performance settings cranked up to 11, and blocks
| centrally issued instead of being mined). It's very
| sensitive to random access disk throughput and latency.
| At the time I had a few tiny VPS on AWS and a spinning
| drive at home, so I evaluated running it there. Even
| besides the price, you simply _cannot run_ it on AWS EBS
| because the disk is just too slow to validate each block
| before the next one arrives. I spent a few hundred
| dollars and bought an NVMe SSD for my home computer
| instead.
| maccard wrote:
| Even without that, you are still at the heart of it
| accessing over a SAN like interface with some sort of
| local cache. Getting an actual local drive on AWS the
| performance is night and day
| pnutjam wrote:
| Sure, you can work around it; but it blows up the savings
| alot of people expect when they don't include this in
| their math.
|
| Also, SAN is often faster then local disk if you have a
| local SAN.
| mootothemax wrote:
| > Just one of the couple dozen databases we run for our
| product in the dev environment alone is over 12 TB.
|
| > How could I not use the cloud?
|
| Funnily enough, one of my side projects has its
| (processed) primary source of truth at that exact size.
| Updates itself automatically every night adding a further
| ~18-25 million rows. Big but not _big_ data, right?
|
| Anyway, that's sitting running happily with instant
| access times (yay solid DB background) on a dedicated OVH
| server that's somewhere around PS600/mo (+VAT) and shared
| with a few other projects. OVH's virtual rack tech is
| pretty amazing too, replicating that kind of size on the
| internal network is trivial too.
| dragonelite wrote:
| Sounds more like your use case is like the 1~2% of the
| cases a simple server and sqlite is maybe not the correct
| answer.
| esseph wrote:
| A high end laptop now can come with double that amount of
| storage.
| cess11 wrote:
| My friends run hundreds of TB:s serviced onto the
| Internet for hobby and pleasure reasons.
|
| It's not all HA, NVMe, web scale stuff, but it's not like
| a few hundred TB:s is a huge undertaking even for
| individual nerds with a bit of money to spend or
| connections at corporations that monotonically
| decommission hardware and is happy to not have to spend
| resources getting rid of it.
|
| This summer I bought a used server for 200 euros from an
| acquaintance, I plan on shoving 140 TB in it and expect
| some of my future databases to exceed 10 TB in size.
| bambax wrote:
| Exactly! I've been self hosting for about two years now, on a
| NAS with Cloudflare in front of it. I need the NAS anyway,
| and Cloudflare is free, so the marginal cost is zero. (And
| even if the CDN weren't free it probably wouldn't cost much.)
|
| I had two projects reach the front page of HN last year,
| everything worked like a charm.
|
| It's unlikely I'll ever go back to professional hosting,
| "cloud" or not.
| John23832 wrote:
| If you have explosive growth, sure cloud.
|
| The vast majority of us that are actually technically
| capable are better served self hosting.
|
| Especially with tools like cloudflare tunnels and
| Tailscale.
| gtech1 wrote:
| any serious business will(might?) have hundreds of Tbs of data.
| I store that in our DC and with a 2nd DC backup for about 1/10
| the price of what it would cost in S3.
|
| When does the cloud start making sense ?
| presentation wrote:
| In my case we have a B2B SaaS where access patterns are
| occasional, revenue per customer is high, general server load
| is low. Cloud bills just don't spike much. Labor is 100x the
| cost of our servers so saving a piddly amount of money on
| server costs while taking on even just a fraction of one
| technical employee's worth of labor costs makes no sense.
| EGreg wrote:
| I started out with linode, a decade ago.
|
| It became much more expensive than AWS, because it bundled the
| hard drive space with the RAM. Couldn't scale one without
| scaling the other. It was ridiculous.
|
| AWS has a bunch of startup credits you can use, if you're
| smart.
|
| But if you want free hosting, nothing beats just CloudFlare.
| They are literally free and even let you sign up anonymously
| with any email. They don't even require a credit card, unlike
| the other ones. You can use cloudflare workers and have a
| blazing fast site, web services, and they'll even take care of
| shooing away bots for you. If you prefer to host something on
| your own computer, well then use their cache and set up a
| cloudflare tunnel. I've done this for Telegram bots for
| example.
|
| Anything else - just use APIs. Need inference? Get a bunch of
| Google credits, and load your stuff into Vertex or whatever.
| Want to take payments anonymously from around the world? Deploy
| a dapp. Pay nothing. Literally nothing!
|
| LEVEL 2:
|
| And if you want to get extra fancy, have people open their
| browser tabs and run your javascript software in there, earning
| your cryptocurrency. Now you've got access to tons of people
| willing to store chunks of files for you, run GPU inference,
| whatever.
|
| Oh do you want to do distributed inference? Wasmcloud:
| https://wasmcloud.com/blog/2025-01-15-running-distributed-ml...
| ... but I'd recommend just paying Google for AI workloads
|
| Want livestreaming that's peer to peer? We've got that too:
| https://github.com/Qbix/Media/blob/main/web/js/WebRTC.js
|
| PS: For webrtc livestreaming, you can't get around having to
| pay for TURN servers, though.
|
| LEVEL 3:
|
| Want to have unstoppable decentralized apps that can even run
| servers? Then use pears (previously dat / hypercore). If you
| change your mindset, from server-based to peer to peer apps,
| then you can run hypercore in the browser, and optionally have
| people download it and run servers.
|
| https://pears.com/news/building-apocalypse-proof-application...
| foldr wrote:
| >It became much more expensive than AWS, because it bundled
| the hard drive space with the RAM. Couldn't scale one without
| scaling the other. It was ridiculous.
|
| You can easily scale hard drive space independently of RAM by
| buying block storage separately and then mounting it on your
| Linode.
| graemep wrote:
| I think every VPS provider I have looked at any time
| recently (and I have been moving things in the last few
| weeks) offers some option for block storage separate from
| compute. Most offer an object storage option too.
| EGreg wrote:
| Not back then
| sz4kerto wrote:
| I think compliance is one of the key advantages of cloud. When
| you go through SOC2 or ISO27001, you can just tick off entire
| categories of questions by saying 'we host on AWS/GCP/Azure'.
|
| It's really shitty that we all need to pay this tax, but I've
| been just asked about whether our company has armed guards and
| redundant HVAC systems in our DC, and I wouldn't know how to do
| that apart from saying that 'our cloud provider has all of
| those'.
| prmoustache wrote:
| In my experience you still have to provide an awful lot of
| "evidence". I guess the advsntage of AWS/GCP/Cloud is that
| they are so ubiquitous you could literally ask an LLM to
| generate fake evidence to speed up the process.
| locknitpicker wrote:
| > That being said, the cloud does have a lot of advantages:
|
| Another advantage is that if you aim to provide a global
| service consumed throughout the world then cloud providers
| allow you to deploy your services in a multitude of locations
| in separate continents. This alone greatly improves
| performance. And you can do that with a couple of clicks.
| hinkley wrote:
| I want more examples of people running the admin interface on
| prem and the user visible parts on the cloud.
| fhd2 wrote:
| My pet peeves are:
|
| 1. For small stuff, AWS et al aren't that much more expensive
| than Hetzner, mostly in the same ballpark, maybe 2x in my
| experience.
|
| 2. What's easy to underestimate for _developers_ is that your
| self hosted setup is most likely harder to get third party
| support for. If you run software on AWS, you can hire someone
| familiar with AWS and as long as you're not doing anything too
| weird, they'll figure it out and modify it in no time.
|
| I absolutely prefer self hosting on root servers, it has always
| been my go to approach for my own companies, big and small
| stuff. But for people that can't or don't want to mess with
| their infrastructure themselves, I do recommend the cloud route
| even with all the current anti hype.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| > 2. What's easy to underestimate for _developers_ is that
| your self hosted setup is most likely harder to get third
| party support for. If you run software on AWS, you can hire
| someone familiar with AWS and as long as you're not doing
| anything too weird, they'll figure it out and modify it in no
| time.
|
| If you're at an early/smaller stage you're not doing anything
| too fancy either way. Even self hosted, it will probably be
| easy enough to understand that you're just deploying a rails
| instance for example.
|
| It only becomes trickier if you're handling a ton of traffic
| or apply a ton of optimizations and end up already in a state
| where a team of sysadmin should be needed while you're doing
| it alone and ad-hoc. IMHO the important part would be to
| properly realize when things will get complicated and move on
| to a proper org or stack before you're stuck.
| fhd2 wrote:
| You'd think that, but from what I've seen, some people come
| up with pretty nasty self hosting setups. All the way from
| "just manually set it all up via SSH last year" to
| Kubernetes. Of course, people can and also definitely do
| create a mess on AWS. It's just that I've seen that _far_
| less.
| matt-p wrote:
| One way of solving for this is to just use K3s or even just
| plain docker. It is then _just_ kuberneters /containers and
| you can hire alot of people who understand that.
| amtamt wrote:
| Absolutely recommend k3s. Start with a single node and keep
| on scaling as customer base increases.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > mostly in the same ballpark, maybe 2x in my experience.
|
| 2x is the same ballpark???
| hshdhdhehd wrote:
| To me DO is a cloud. It is pricey (for performance) and
| convenient. It is possibly a wiser bet than AWS for a startup
| that wants to spend less developer (read expensive!) time on
| infra.
| ksec wrote:
| >most startups that just run an EC2 instance will save a lot of
| cash going to Hetzner, Linode, Digital Ocean or whatever. I do
| host at Hetzner myself and so do a lot of my clients. That
| being said, _the cloud_ does have a lot of advantages:
|
| When did Linode and DO got dropped and not being part of _the
| cloud_ ?
|
| What used to separate VPS and Cloud was resources at per second
| billing. Which DO and Linode along with a lot of 2nd tier
| hosting also offer. They are part of _cloud_.
|
| Scaling used to be an issue, because buying and installing your
| hardware or sending it to DC to be installed and ready takes
| too much time. Dedicated Servers solution weren't big enough at
| the time. And the highest Core count at the time was 8 core
| Xeon CPU in 2010. Today we have EPYC Zen 6c at 256 Core and
| likely double the IPC. Scaling issues that requires a Rack of
| server can now be done with 1 single server and fit everything
| inside RAM.
|
| Managed database? PlanetScale or Neon.
|
| A lot of issues for medium to large size project that "Cloud"
| managed to solve are no longer an issue in 2025. Unless you are
| top 5-10% of project that requires these sort of flexibilities.
| bobdvb wrote:
| For a lot of people (not me), if it's not from AWS, Azure,
| GCP or Oracle then it's not cloud, it's just a sparkling
| hosting provider.
|
| I had someone on this site arguing that Cloudflare isn't a
| cloud provider...
| graemep wrote:
| > You're getting a lot of services readily available. Need
| offsite backups? A few clicks
|
| I think it is a lot safer for backups to be with an entirely
| different provider. It protects you in case of account
| compromise, account closure, disputes.
|
| If using cloud and you want to be safe, you should be multi-
| cloud. People have been saved from disaster by multi-cloud
| setups.
|
| > You're not paying up-front costs (vs. investing hundreds of
| dollars for buying server hardware)
|
| Not true for VPSes or rented dedicated servers either.
|
| > Peak-heavy loads can be a lot cheaper.
|
| they have to be very spiky indeed though. LLMs might fit but a
| lot of compute heavy spiky loads do not. I saved a client money
| on video transcoding that only happened once per upload and
| only over a month or two an year by renting a dedi all ear
| round rather than using the AWS transcoding service.
|
| > Compared to the rack hosting setup described in the post.
| Hetzner, Linode, etc. do provide multiple AZs with dedicated
| servers.
|
| You have to do work to ensure things run across multiple
| availability zones (and preferably regions) anyway.
|
| > But an RDS instance with solid backups-equivalent will
| usually not amortize quickly, if you need to pay someone to set
| it up.
|
| You have more forced upgrades.
|
| An unmanaged database will only need a lot of work if operating
| at large scale. If you are then its probably well worth
| employing a DBA anyway as an AWS or similar managed DB is not
| going to do all the optimising and tuning a DBA will do.
| matt-p wrote:
| I mean there are _many_ places that sell multi AZ, hourly
| billed VPS /Bare Metal/GPU at a fraction of the cost of AWS.
|
| I would personally have an account at one of those places and
| back up to there with everything ready to spin up instances and
| failover if you lose your rack, and use them for any bursty
| loads.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| "I FINALLY got everything off the cloud"
|
| ...
|
| ...
|
| "P.S. follow me on Twitter"
|
| So uh, not everything
| tamimio wrote:
| It's probably the whole point, so he can post later how he paid
| the $120 from twitter income and now running it for free :)
| anechouapechou wrote:
| Fittingly, his website was hugged to death
| selectively wrote:
| It's almost like Clouds are really good at scaling and some
| rented server isn't! Perfect, almost poetic.
| arjie wrote:
| I use Cloudflare in front of my personal stuff. Then it's
| just a quick DNS switch to go direct if I need to.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| It's entirely possible for a rented server to host a site
| that gets millions of views. It's also entirely possible to
| make an AWS setup that chokes with 100.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| It's almost like nobody cares about scaling their blog.
| ezekiel68 wrote:
| Loaded instantly for me (never visited, so not cached), in the
| central US.
| Esophagus4 wrote:
| Jeez, this was a painful read. I actually stopped after a few
| paragraphs and asked AI to make it more technically focused and
| remove the ranting so I could stomach it.
|
| Strawman arguments, ad hominem attacks and Spongebob mocking
| memes, and the casual venturing into conspiracy theories and
| malicious intentions...
|
| > Why do all these people care if I save more money or not? ...
| If they're wrong, and if I and more people like me manage to
| convince enough people that they're wrong, they may be out of a
| job soon.
|
| I have a feeling AWS is doing fine without him. Cloud is one of
| the fastest growing areas in tech because their product solves a
| need for certain people. There is no larger conspiracy to keep
| cloud in business by silencing dissent on Twitter.
|
| > You will hear a bunch of crap from people that have literally
| never tried the alternative. People with no real hands-on
| experience managing servers for their own projects for any
| sustained period of time.
|
| This is more of a rant than a thoughtful technical article. I
| don't know what I was expecting, because I clicked on the title
| knowing it was clickbait, so shame on me, I guess...
|
| Is this what I'm missing by not having Twitter?
| dsjoerg wrote:
| a simple valid point wrapped in an enormous amount of garbage
| arguments from both sides. watching idiots argue is exhausting
| shooker435 wrote:
| The author touches on it briefly, but I'd argue that the cloud is
| immensely helpful for building (and tearing down) an MVP or
| proving an early market for a new company using startup credits
| or free tiers offered by all vendors. Once a business model has
| been proven, individual components and the underlying
| infrastructure can be moved out of the cloud as soon as cost
| becomes a concern.
|
| This means that teams must make an up-front architectural
| decision to develop apps in a server-agnostic manner, and
| developers must stay disciplined to keep components portable from
| day one, but you can get _a lot_ of mileage out of free credits
| without burning dollars on any infrastructure. The biggest
| challenge becomes finding the time to perform these migrations
| among other competing priorities, such as new feature
| development, especially if you 're growing fast.
|
| Our startup is mostly built on Google Cloud, but I don't think
| our sales rep is very happy with how little we spend or that
| we're unwilling to "commit" to spending. The ability to move off
| of the cloud, or even just to another cloud, provides a lot of
| leverage in the negotiating seat.
|
| Cloud vendors can also lead to an easier risk/SLA conversation
| for downstream customers. Depending on your business, enterprise
| users like to see SLAs and data privacy laws respected around the
| globe, and cloud providers make it easy to say "not my problem"
| if things are structured correctly.
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| Seems like nowadays people seem less concerned with vendor
| lockin than they were 15 years ago. One of the reason to want
| to avoid lockin is to be able to move when the price gouging
| gets just a little bit too greedy that the move is worth the
| cost. One of the drawbacks of all these built in services at
| AWS is the expense of trying to recreate the architecture
| elsewhere.
| wiether wrote:
| And yet, most of those success stories about ditching the
| cloud are from people that were not using services with hard
| vendor lock-ins.
|
| Reading author's article:
|
| > For me, that meant:
|
| > RDS for the PostgreSQL database (my biggest monthly cost,
| in fact)
|
| > EC2 for the web server (my 2nd biggest monthly cost)
|
| > Elasticache for Redis
|
| https://rameerez.com/how-i-exited-the-cloud/
| nineteen999 wrote:
| > This means that teams must make an up-front architectural
| decision to develop apps in a server-agnostic manner
|
| Right. But none of the cloud providers encourage that mode of
| thinking, since they all have complete different frontends,
| API's, different versions of the same services (load balancers,
| storage) etc. Even if you standardize on k8s, the
| implementation can be chalk and cheese between two cloud
| providers. The lock in is way worse with cloud providers.
| brendamn wrote:
| If you're going to write a post about why self-hosting is better
| than cloud*, then it's probably a good idea to make sure your
| site loads in under a minute.
|
| * at least I assume what this post is; I'm still waiting for it
| to load.
| kiwijamo wrote:
| Loaded instantly for me. :)
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| sounds like the site isn't able to guarantee reliable service
| but it works for some people in an unpredictable way
| pfix wrote:
| I would really be interested in an actual comparison, where e.g.
| someone compares the full TCO of a mysql server with backup, hot
| standby in another data center and admin costs.
|
| On AWS an Aurora RDS is not cheap. But I don't have to spend time
| or money on an admin.
|
| Is the cost justified? Because that's what cloud is. Not even
| talking about the level of compliance I get from having every
| layer encrypted when my hosted box is just a screwdriver away
| from data getting out the old school way.
|
| When I'm small enough or big enough, self managed makes sense and
| probably is cheaper. But when getting the right people with
| enough redundancy and knowledge is getting the expensive part...
|
| But actually - I've never seen this in any if these arguments so
| far. Probably because actual time required to manage a db server
| is really unpredictable.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| > Probably because actual time required to manage a db server
| is really unpredictable.
|
| This, and also startups are quite heterogeneous. If you have an
| engineer on your team with experience in hosting their own
| servers (or at least a homelab-person), setting up that service
| with sufficient resiliency for your average startup will be
| done within one relaxed afternoon. If your team consists of
| designers and engineers who hardly ever used a command line,
| setting up a shaky version of the same thing will cost you days
| - and so will any issue that comes up.
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| Its a skillset that is out of favour at the moment as well
| but having someone who has done serverops and devops and can
| develop as well is a bit of a money saver generally because
| they open up possibilities that don't exist otherwise. I
| think its a skillset that no one really hired for past about
| 2010 when cloud was mostly taking off and got replaced with
| cloud engineers or pure devops or ops people but there used
| to be people with this mixed skillset in most teams.
| beeflet wrote:
| every box is a screwdriver away
| mattmanser wrote:
| I've never had a server go down. Most companies don't need a
| hot server because it's never going to be needed.
|
| AWS + Azure have both gone down with major outages indivudually
| more over the last 10 years than any of the servers in
| companies I worked with in the 10 years before that.
|
| And in comparable periods, not a single server failed or disk
| failed or whatever.
|
| So I get SOME companies need hot standby servers, almost no
| company, no SaaS, no startup, actually does.
|
| Because if it's that mission critical, then they would have
| already had to move off the cloud due to how frequently
| AWs/Azure/etc. have gone down over the last 10 years, often for
| 1/2 day or so,
| pfix wrote:
| I've had a lot of servers going down. I've had data centers
| going down. For various reasons - but normally not a failed
| disk but configuration errors due to human error.
|
| And I've had enough cases where the company relied on just
| that one guy who knew how things worked - and when they
| retired or left, you had big work ahead understanding the
| systems that guy maintained and never let anyone else touch.
| Yes, this might also be a leadership issue - but it's also an
| issue if you have no one else with that specific knowledge.
| So I prefer standardized, prepackaged, off the shelf
| solutions that I can hire replacable people for.
| ascorbic wrote:
| Cheap shot maybe, but the fact that the page takes 10 seconds to
| load when it hits the HN front page is a great, inadvertant
| illustration of why you might want to use the cloud sometimes.
| beeflet wrote:
| The failure mode of self-hosting is that your site gets hugged
| to death, the failure mode of the cloud is that you lose a ton
| of money. For a blog that doesn't earn you anything, the choice
| is clear.
|
| Besides, you can just put it behind cloudflare for free.
| dabockster wrote:
| > The failure mode of self-hosting is that your site gets
| hugged to death
|
| Learn 2 load balance
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| If only it were that simple. Don't forget:
|
| Learn 2 HA
|
| Learn 2 MFA
|
| Learn 2 backup
|
| Learn 2 recover within RTO
|
| Learn 2 ETL
|
| Learn 2 queue
|
| Learn 2 scale horizontally
|
| Learn 2 audit log
|
| Learn 2 SEIM
|
| Learn 2 continuously gather SOC evidence
|
| ...
| ascorbic wrote:
| Absolutely. And I never said that everybody should use the
| cloud. Contrary to OP, it's more complicated than that. Not
| every site has the same needs. Some sites need scaling. Some
| sites are fine with being hugged to death, others would lose
| millions of dollars if they were. Some people are happy to
| tinker with their nginx config and package upgrades etc,
| others prefer to deploy and forget it (with cost controls
| enabled).
|
| Disclosure: I work for Cloudflare, but 25 years ago served my
| own site from an iBook under the stairs.
| recursivecaveat wrote:
| > the failure mode of the cloud is that you lose a ton of
| money
|
| I'm perfectly happy to use cloud stuff for work. I will never
| ever give any cloud platform my personal credit card. I don't
| want to be the position of a misconfiguration leaving my
| finances at the mercy of the AWS forgiveness gods.
| tecleandor wrote:
| That happens a lot to blogs deployed on the cloud too. They
| just need to put a small cache in front and they'll be able to
| serve one or two orders of magnitude more requests per second.
| davisr wrote:
| Only took 1 second for me.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Took under a second. What part of the world are you located in?
| rameerez wrote:
| OP here. As others have said, it loads immediately for me
| (tested on desktop + on mobile data + incognito)
|
| The entire site is cached + Cloudflare sits on top of
| everything. I just ran a couple performance tests under the
| current HN traffic (~120 concurrent visitors) and everything
| looks good, all loads under 1 second. The server is quite happy
| at an average load of 0.06 right now, not even close to start
| breaking a sweat.
|
| Turns out you can get off the cloud and hit the frontpage of HN
| and your site will be alright.
| wheybags wrote:
| 100% true, I've hit the front page of hn on a server with an
| old i5 (aka consumer hardware, and not even high end) with no
| cloudflare or similar caching, and had no problems. Computers
| are fast, and serving static html over https is a solved
| problem.
| ascorbic wrote:
| You're right that serving static files is easy, but OP is
| using WordPress, not static files.
|
| Disclosure: I work for Cloudflare.
| ascorbic wrote:
| My guess is your caching was misconfigured in some way. It's
| fast for me now, but before commenting I tried several times
| and it always took at least 10s to load, often more. Others
| have also reported very slow load times. I was surprised
| because I saw at the time that it was behind Cloudflare.
| Disclosure: I work for Cloudflare.
| hshdhdhehd wrote:
| You want to architect. Thats it. You can handle the 50krps that
| you wont get from HN from a dedicated box.
| normie3000 wrote:
| Help convince me I should be confident taking responsibility for:
|
| * off-site db backups
|
| * a guaranteed db restore process
|
| * auditable access to servers
|
| * log persistence and integrity
|
| * timely security patching
|
| * intrusion detection
|
| so that my employer can save money.
| DANmode wrote:
| How many URLs of Google et al failing to provide per instance
| security (leaking your files etc) to other users would you like
| to see?
| normie3000 wrote:
| At least one?
| DANmode wrote:
| https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/04/google-accidentally-sent-
| som...
| normie3000 wrote:
| So security's too hard for Google.
|
| But if this happens at work and we're using Google Cloud,
| I say "sorry boss, Google messed up".
|
| If we're running our own servers, who do I blame?
| DANmode wrote:
| Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM!
| normie3000 wrote:
| :) you definitely haven't changed my mind!
| otterley wrote:
| That wasn't GCP. Their cloud computing business is
| operated very differently from their consumer businesses.
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| Not trying to be dismissive of the article but, the way it's
| written, it reads like a lot of whining.
|
| He could have summed up with "AWS is expensive, host your own
| server instead".
| jp57 wrote:
| The article is hugged to death. Maybe it wasn't hosted in the
| cloud?
| ed_mercer wrote:
| Right, because it's not possible for cloud services to get
| hugged to death.
| rameerez wrote:
| Loads just fine?
| tqi wrote:
| I'd be more interested to understand (from folk who were there)
| what the conditions were that made AWS et al such a runaway hit.
| What did folks gain, and have those conditions meaningfully
| changed in some way that makes it less of a slam dunk?
|
| My recollection from working at a tech company in the early 2010s
| is that renting rack space and building servers was expensive and
| time consuming, estimating what the right hardware configuration
| would be for your business was tricky, and scaling different
| services independently was impossible. also having multi regional
| redundancy was rare (remember when squarespace was manually
| carrying buckets of petrol for generators up many flights of
| stairs to keeps servers online post sandy?[1]).
|
| AWS fixed much of that. But maybe things have changed in ways
| that meaningfully changes the calculus?
|
| [1] https://www.squarespace.com/press-
| coverage/2012-11-1-after-s...
| fennecbutt wrote:
| Et al is for people, Et cetera is for things.
|
| Edit: although actually many people on here are American so I
| guess for you aws is legally a person...
| nemo wrote:
| As an American who studied Latin:
|
| Et al. = et alii, "and other things", "among other things".
|
| Etc. = et cetera, "and so on".
|
| Either may or may not apply to people depending on context.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > although actually many people on here are American so I
| guess for you aws is legally a person...
|
| Corporate legal personhood is actually older than
| Christianity, and it being applied to businesses (which were
| late to the game of being allowed to be corporations) is
| still significantly older than the US (starting with the
| British East India Company), not a unique quirk of American
| law.
| fennecbutt wrote:
| Oh I didn't how that, thanks for the lesson.
|
| Tbf it just sounds...so American, so I assumed, my bad. But
| East India Company was involved...whew I guess that does
| make sense, oof.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| What _is_ unique in the US is the interaction between
| corporate personhood and our First Amendment and the way
| that our courts have applied that to limit political
| campaign finance laws, and a lot of "corporate
| personhood" controversy is really about that, not
| actually about corporate personhood as a broad concept.
| sarchertech wrote:
| People also get confused about the Citizens United
| ruling. It had nothing to do with corporate personhood.
|
| The ruling said that since a person has first amendment
| rights, those same rights extend to a group of people--
| any group--whether it's a non profit organization, a
| corporation, or something else.
| BirAdam wrote:
| Well, it's also what allows the executives, boards, and
| owners of companies to be divorced from the consequences
| of their actions in a legal sense much of the time.
| LtWorf wrote:
| Source of it being older than christianity?
| tqi wrote:
| I don't think that's a hard and fast rule? I think et al is
| for named, specific entities of any kind. You might say "palm
| trees, evergreens trees, etc" but "General Sherman, Grand
| Oak, et al"
| jgb1984 wrote:
| You're falling into the false dichotomy that always comes up
| with these topics: as if the choice is between the cloud and
| renting rack space while applying your own thermal paste on the
| CPUs. In reality, for most people, renting dedicated servers is
| the goldilocks solution (not colocation with your own
| hardware). You get an incredible amount of power for a very
| reasonable price, but you don't need to drive to a datacenter
| to swap out a faulty PSU, the on site engineers take care of
| that for you. I ordered an extra server today from Hetzner. It
| was available 90 seconds afterwards. Using their installer I
| had Ubuntu 24.04 LTS up and running, and with some Ansible
| playbooks to finish configuration, all in all from the moment
| of ordering to fully operational was about 10 minutes tops. If
| I no longer need the server I just cancel it, the billing is
| per hour these days.
|
| Bang for the buck is unmatched, and none of the endless layers
| of cloud abstraction getting in the way. A fixed price,
| predictable, unlimited bandwidth, blazing fast performance.
| Just you and the server, as it's meant to be. I find it a
| blissful way to work.
| alphager wrote:
| > I ordered an extra server today from Hetzner. It was
| available 90 seconds afterwards.
|
| Back when AWS was starting, this would have taken 1-3 days.
| mattstainton001 wrote:
| True, but I think you're touching on something important
| regarding value. Value is different depending on the
| consumer: for you, you're willing and able to manage more of
| the infrastructure than someone who has a more narrow
| skillset. Being able to move the responsibility for areas of
| the service on to the provider is what we're paying for, and
| for some, paying more money to offload more of the
| responsibility actually results in more value for the
| organization/consumer
| lelanthran wrote:
| > all in all from the moment of ordering to fully operational
| was about 10 minutes tops.
|
| I think this is an important point. It's quick.
|
| When cloud got popular, doing what you did could take upwards
| of 3 months in an organisation, with some being closer to 8
| months. The organisational bureaucracy meant that _any_ asset
| purchase was a long procedure.
|
| So, yeah, the choices were:
|
| 1. Wait 6 months to spend out of capex budget
|
| Or
|
| 2. Use the opex budget and get something in 10m.
|
| We are no longer in that phase, so cloud _services_ makes
| very little sense now because you _can_ still use the opex
| budget to get a VPS and have in going in minutes with
| automation.
| le-mark wrote:
| I'd add this. Servers used to be viewed as pets; the system
| admins spent a lot time on snow flake configurations and
| managing each one. When we started standing up tens of
| servers to host the nodes of our app (early 2000s); the
| simple admin overhead was huge. One thing I have not seen
| mentioned here was how powerful ansible and similar tools
| were at simplifying server management. Iirc being able to
| provision and standup servers simply with known
| configurations was a huge win aws provided.
| BirAdam wrote:
| Even if you don't go ansible/chef/puppet/salt, just having
| git is good. You can put your configs in git, use a git
| action to change whatever variables, and deploy to the
| target. No extra tools needed, and you get versioned
| configs.
| zejn wrote:
| Also, it was a very very different landscape.
|
| You were commonly given a network uplink and a list of
| public IP addresses you were to set up on your box or
| boxes. IPMI/BMC were not a given on a server so if you
| broke it, you needed to have remote hands and probably
| brains too.
|
| Virtualisation was in the early days and most of the
| services were co-hosted on the server.
|
| Software defined networks and Open vSwitch were also not a
| thing back then. There were switches with support for VLANs
| and you might have had a private network to link together
| frontend and backend boxes.
|
| Servers today can be configured remotely. They have their
| own management interfaces so you can access the console and
| install OS remotely. The network switches can be
| reconfigured on the fly, making the network topology
| reconfigurable online. Even storage can be mapped via SAN.
| The only hands on issue is hardware malfunction.
|
| If I was to compare with today, it was like having a
| wardrobe of Raspberry Pies on a dumb switch, plugging in
| cables when changes were needed.
| baobun wrote:
| One factor was huge amounts of free credits for the first year
| or more for any startup that appeared above-board and bothered
| to ask properly.
|
| Second, egress data being very expensive with ingress being
| free has contributed to making them sticky gravity holes.
| dabockster wrote:
| The free credits... what a WILD time! Just show up to a
| hackathon booth, ask nicely, and you'd get months/years worth
| of "startup level" credits. Nothing super powerful -
| basically the equivalent of a few quad core boxes in a broom
| closet. But still for "free".
| throwup238 wrote:
| AWS also made huge inroads in big companies because engineering
| teams could run their own account off of their budget and
| didn't have to go through to IT to requisition servers, which
| was often red tape hell. In my experience it was just as much
| about internal politics as the technical benefits.
| ericbarrett wrote:
| > which was often red tape hell
|
| Seconded. I was working for a storage vendor when AWS was
| first ascendant. After we delivered hardware, it was
| typically 6-12 weeks to even get it powered up, and often a
| few weeks longer to complete deployment. This is _with_
| professional services, e.g. us handling the setup once we had
| wires to plug in. Similar lead time for ordering, racking,
| and provisioning standard servers.
|
| The paperwork was massive, too. Order forms, expense
| justifications, conversations with Legal, invoices, etc. etc.
|
| And when I say 6-12 weeks, I mean that was a standard time -
| there were outliers measured in months.
| rand846633 wrote:
| Absolutely. At several startups, getting a simple
| EUR20-50/month Hetzner server meant rounds with leadership
| and a little dance with another department to hand over a
| credit card. With AWS, leadership suddenly accepted that
| Ops/Dev could provision what we thought was right. It isn't
| logically compelling, but that's why the cloud gained
| traction so quickly: it removed friction.
| dabockster wrote:
| > At several startups, getting a simple EUR20-50/month
| Hetzner server meant rounds with leadership and a little
| dance with another department to hand over a credit card.
|
| That's not a startup if you can't go straight to the
| founder and get a definite yes/no answer in a few minutes.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| It was the accountants. CapEx vs. OpEx.
| saulpw wrote:
| Computing power (compute, memory, storage) has increased 100x
| or more since 2005, but AWS prices are not proportionally
| cheaper. So where you were getting a reasonable value in ~2012,
| that value is no longer reasonable, and by an increasing
| margin.
| noosphr wrote:
| This is the big one.
|
| In 2006 when the first EC2 instances showed up they were on
| par with an ok laptop and would take 24 months to pay enough
| in rent to cover the cost of hardware.
|
| Today the smallest instance is a joke and the medium
| instances are the size of a 5 year old phone. It takes
| between 3 to 6 months to pay enough in rent to cover the cost
| of the hardware.
|
| What was a great deal in 2006 is a terrible one today.
| dabockster wrote:
| > But maybe things have changed in ways that meaningfully
| changes the calculus?
|
| I'd argue that Docker has done that in a LOT of ways. The huge
| draw to AWS, from what I recall with my own experiences, was
| that it was cheaper than on-prem VMware licenses and hardware.
| So instead of virtualizing on proprietary hypervisors, firms
| outsourced their various technical and legal responsibilities
| to AWS. Now that Docker is more mature, largely open source,
| way less resource intensive, and can run on almost any compute
| hardware made in the last 15 years (or longer), the
| cost/benefit analysis starts to favor moving off AWS.
|
| Also AWS used to give out free credits like free candy. I bet
| most of this is vendor lock in and a lot of institutional brain
| drain.
| throwaway201606 wrote:
| Answers here
|
| https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cloud-adoption-frame...
|
| TL;DR version - its about money and business balance sheets,
| not about technology.
|
| For businesses past a certain size, going to cloud is a
| decision ALWAYS made by business, not by technology.
|
| From a business perspective, having a "relatively fixed"
| ongoing cost (which is an operational expense ie OpEx ) even if
| it is significantly higher than what it would cost to do things
| with internal buy and build out (which is a capital expense
| cost ie CapEx), make financial planning, taxes and managing
| EBITDA much easier.
|
| Note that no one on the business really cares what the tech
| implications are as long at "tech still sorta runs mostly OK".
|
| It also, via financial wizardry, makes tech cost "much less" on
| a quarter over quarter and year over year basis.
| ascorbic wrote:
| _raises hand_ I ran a small SaaS business in the early 2000s,
| pre-AWS.
|
| Renting dedicated servers was really expensive. To the extent
| that it was cheaper for us to buy a 1U server and host it in a
| local datacenter. Maintaining that was a real pain. Getting the
| train to London to replace a hard drive was so much fun. CDNs
| were "call for pricing". EC2 was a revelation when it launched.
| It let us expand as needed without buying servers or paying for
| rack space, and try experiments without shoving everything onto
| one server and fiddling with Apache configs in production.
| Lambda made things even easier (at the expense of needing new
| architectures).
|
| The thing that has changed is that renting bare metal is orders
| of magnitude cheaper, and comparable in price to shared hosting
| in the bad old days.
| tonymet wrote:
| What I always say when given a false choice: ?porque no las dos?
|
| vcpu, iops, transfer fees, storage -- they are all resources
| going into a pool .
|
| If Hetzner is giving you 10TB for $100 , then host your static
| files/images there and save $800.
|
| Apps are very modular. You have services, asyncs, LBs, static
| files . Just put the compute where it is most cost effective.
|
| You don't have to close your AWS account to stick it to the man.
| Like any utility, just move your resources to where they are most
| affordable.
| suriya-ganesh wrote:
| I've been at too many startups with a devops team that would
| rather provision 15 machines with 4GB RAM THAN ONE WITH 64GB.
|
| I once got into an argument with a lead architect about it and
| it's really easy to twist the conversation into "don't you think
| we'll reach that scale?" To justify complexity.
|
| The bottom line is for better or worse, the cloud and micro
| services are keeping a lot of jobs relevant and there's no
| benefit in convincing people otherwise
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Multiple small boxes is actually better than one giant box, for
| a whole lot of reasons. Scaling isn't the issue.
| JSR_FDED wrote:
| This needs some context. I can think of several cases where
| this wouldn't be the be right.
| nubinetwork wrote:
| Big box VM host running several VMs, hardware starts to
| fail, brings the entire setup to its knees. That wouldn't
| happen if you had each VM running on its own physical
| hardware, unless the UPS/PDU died...
| suriya-ganesh wrote:
| VMs are able to live migrate these days. Single VM has a
| lot more uptime guarantee than a distributed system with
| multiple over the network communication layers.
| nubinetwork wrote:
| Not if you only have one VM host ;)
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Here's a basic comparison: Many small boxes
| Pros: - Cost. Small boxes cost less. Spend less
| or spend more as needed. If one dies, cheaper to replace.
| - Efficiency. Scaling *down* saves money when load is low.
| Can schedule specific loads to specific boxes. -
| Redundancy. Multiple VMS, OSes, network paths, etc. No
| single point of failure. - Zero-downtime. Rolling
| deployments, upgrades means changes with no user impact.
| - System bandwidth. More network links, cpus, kernels,
| disks, etc = more bandwidth, capacity. -
| Performance resilience. A heavily loaded app on one server
| doesn't affect others. - Immutability. "Pets"
| rather than "cattle" uses automation to reduce
| maintenance/instability. - Scalability. When you
| run out of resources, adding more is easy, zero impact.
| Cons: - Does not work with applications that
| require large memory/cpu. - Inefficient for apps
| that require shared filesystem access (as opposed to
| database). - Requires smarter architecture to
| reduce long tail of cross-host calls. - More
| transient network path failures, troubleshooting issues.
| One big box Pros: - Allows
| applications which require large memory/cpu. -
| More efficient for apps that share a filesystem.
| - Simpler architecture. - Fewer network path
| failures. Cons: - Large cost that you
| can't easily reduce as needed. - Waste (in unused
| resources) unless load is constant. - Single
| point of failure, for reliability and security. -
| Upgrades require reboots. App goes down; possibility the
| server might not boot up properly. - Single
| network, cpu, kernel, disks(s), etc become bottlenecks.
| - A single heavily-loaded process, excess interrupts, etc
| can bring down entire system performance. - Often
| treated as "pet" rather than "cattle"; creates more
| maintenance, instability. - Not scalable.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Dangit, meant "cattle rather than pets" for small box
| pros
| mrandish wrote:
| > Most people complaining about what I did happen to have
| "devops", "cloud engineer", "serverless guy", "AWS certified", or
| something similar in their bio.
|
| _"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his
| salary depends on his not understanding it."_
|
| _-- Upton Sinclair_
| jaredhallen wrote:
| I'm fully aware this is pedantic, but you can't save 10x. You can
| pay 1/10. You can save 90%. Your previous costs could have been
| 10x your current costs. But 10x is more by definition, not less.
| You can't save it.
| PantaloonFlames wrote:
| +1 words matter
|
| Clarity of expression is a superpower
|
| I don't feel it's pedantic at all.
| big_maybe wrote:
| People commonly use this expression in everyday conversation,
| such as, "you could save 10 times as much if you would just
| shop at Costco." So I agree with OP, their comment is correct
| but pedantic.
| happymellon wrote:
| > People commonly
|
| Your example them was a weasel worded advert that uses
| meaningless terminology to make something sound big
| (savings in this case).
|
| People don't use that expression.
| baq wrote:
| Communication is a superpower. You say something and the
| other person understands.
|
| Being pedantic about words means you think effective
| communication is somehow wrong. Be precise, don't be
| pedantic.
| dabockster wrote:
| Apples and oranges, tbh.
| veqq wrote:
| In English, x or time(s) after a number marks a "unit" used by
| various verbs. A 10x increase. Increase by 10x. Go up 10x. Some
| of these verbs are negative like decrease or save. "Save 10x"
| is the same as "divide by 10". Four times less, 5 times smaller
| etc. are long attested.
| adammarples wrote:
| No, x literally means multiply. It doesn't somehow also mean
| divide. They should use the percent sign, it's what it is
| for. 10x my costs means 10 x mycost, it's literally an
| equation
| veqq wrote:
| It's just inversion, like 2 to the power of 2 or 2 to the
| power of negative 2. These negative words inverse it just
| the same. You may dislike it, but millions of people have
| spoken this way for a long time.
|
| > x literally means multiply
|
| And some use the dot operator or even 2(3) or (2)(3). When
| programming, we tend to use *.
| jaredhallen wrote:
| Agree to disagree.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| It's basically multiplication with fractions, just like you
| get 1/4 from 1/2 * 1/2, which is once again a
| multiplication that turns into division
|
| I agree that it's a suboptimal and click baity way to
| phrase it though...
| imp0cat wrote:
| Exactly, it's multiplication.
|
| Example: He was saving $10 every month before the change.
| Then he switched and now he is saving 10 x $10, ie $100
| every month.
|
| But that's not the case here, right? And that's why the
| parent post is correct.
| happymellon wrote:
| Thats not how English works.
|
| Saved 10x would imply there was an amount being saved that
| they multipled.
| immibis wrote:
| Consider it as getting 10x the resources for the same price -
| that is, the resource-to-price ratio is 10x. Except you don't
| need 10x the resources so you choose to get 1x the resources
| for 0.1x the price instead.
| jaredhallen wrote:
| Sure. Getting 10x the resources for the same price is another
| valid way to express the thought. Saving 10x isn't, though.
| fuzzy_biscuit wrote:
| I think you would be more accurate to say 'communicate the
| thought' as opposed to 'express the thought'. Communication
| carries the explicit desire to have an idea be shared.
| Expression carries no shared understanding and is personal.
|
| The author expressed the thought in a valid way because we
| understood their words, but they did not communicate it
| well because we are confused about their understanding of
| those ideas.
| gerdesj wrote:
| Cost of item = 10 First discounted cost of item = 9
| => First saving = 1 Second discounted cost of item =
| 6 => Second saving = 4 Second saving is 4x
| first saving. (Edit - formatting)
| jaredhallen wrote:
| But that's 4x the savings compared to another saving. I
| suppose you've upped the pedantry and are technically
| correct, but that's a pretty narrow use case and not the one
| used in the article.
| jand wrote:
| This becomes much clearer with a balance sheet in front of you.
|
| What is saving? _Spending less_, that's all. Saving generates
| no income, it makes you go broke slower.
|
| Independent of the price or the product, you can never save
| more than factor 1.0 (or 100%).
|
| Wasn't there a guy on TV who wanted to make prices go down
| 1500%? Same BS, different flavor.
| arcastroe wrote:
| hmm.. if you reduce latency from one second to a hundred
| milliseconds, could you celebrate that you've made it 10x
| faster, or would you have the same quibble there too?
|
| Edit: Thinking about this some more: You could say you are
| saving 9x [of the new cost], and it would be a correct
| statement. I believe the error is assuming the reference frame
| is the previous cost vs the new cost, but since it is not
| specified, it could be either.
| thedufer wrote:
| > if you reduce latency from one second to a hundred
| milliseconds, could you celebrate that you've made it 10x
| faster
|
| Yes you can, because speed has units of inverse time and
| latency has units of time. So it could be correct to say that
| cutting latency to 1/10 of its original value is equivalent
| to making it 10x the original speed - that's how inverses
| work.
|
| Savings are not, to my knowledge, measured in units of
| inverse dollars.
| rr808 wrote:
| I could care less.
| abrookewood wrote:
| So .... you DO care then? Or do you mean "I could NOT care
| less"?
| rr808 wrote:
| Yes, that is why I replied with this to a pendant. :)
| pityJuke wrote:
| On orders of the late Queen:
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=om7O0MFkmpw
| abrookewood wrote:
| Thanks - that is perfect.
| lblack00 wrote:
| Colloquially, differences in powers of 10 would be better
| stated as differences of orders of magnitude.
| tmtvl wrote:
| You can save 10x, but you need to have an x first. So if you've
| got formula A which costs 500 EUR, and formula B which costs
| 480, you're saving 20 EUR. If formula C costs 300, you could
| save 200, which is 10x what you would save using B. But just as
| people don't understand when to use 'fewer' or misuse
| 'literally' to mean 'figuratively' (which is rather the
| opposite meaning of the word they use); words don't mean
| anything any more, it's all about the feelings man.
| skopje wrote:
| "To them, it's way too convenient to be on AWS: not only it
| solves their problem, but it's also a shiny object. It's
| technically complex, it makes them look smart in front of other
| devs, "
|
| why? why be so obnoxious to other people who you claim are being
| obnoxious to you. no need to read your blog post now/
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| Its not actually that hard to get your own server racked up in a
| data centre, I have done it. Since it was only one box that I
| built and installed at home I just shipped it and they racked it
| in the shared area and plugged the power and network in and gave
| me the IP address. It was cheaper than renting from someone like
| hetzner, was about PS15 a month at the time for 1A and 5TB a
| month of traffic at 1gbps. Also had a one off install fee of
| PS75.
|
| At the time I did this no one had good gaming CPUs in the cloud,
| they are still a bit rare really especially in VPS offerings and
| I was hosting a gaming community and server. So I made a pair of
| machines in a 1U with dual machines in there and had a public and
| private server with raid 1 drives on both and redundant power.
| Ran that for a gaming server for many years until it was
| obsolete. It wasn't difficult and I think the machine was about
| PS1200 in all, which for 2 computers running game servers wasn't
| too terrible.
|
| I didn't do this because it was necessarily cheaper, I did it
| because I couldn't find a cloud server to rent with a high
| clockspeed CPU in it. I tested numerous cloud providers, sent
| emails asking for specs and after months of chasing it down I
| didn't feel like I had much choice. Turned out to be quite easy
| and over the years it saved a fortune.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| the problem isn't setup. its maintaining it. Its not an easy
| job to do that some times. Im not trying to dissuade people
| from running there own servers, but its something to consider.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| What is the mechanism for such services if you want to replace
| a component (ex. a failing hard drive or upgrade ram)?
| fragmede wrote:
| "Remote hands" is the DC term for exactly what it sounds
| like. You write a list of instructions and someone hired by
| the DC will go over to your rack and do the thing.
| nucleative wrote:
| We did this a lot in the early 2000's. At the time I worked for
| a company with offices in Bellevue and we put our own hardware
| in full sized racks at a datacenter in the komo4 building in
| Seattle.
|
| Because of proximity it was easy to run over and service the
| systems physically if needed, and we also used modem based KVM
| systems if we really needed to reboot a locked up system
| quickly (not sure that ever actually happened!).
|
| I'm sure customer owner hardware place in a datacenter rack is
| still a major business
| puttycat wrote:
| It's an informative post but I really dislike the language and
| style that are becoming common in this kind of posts, e.g.:
|
| > Look, first of all, you're as unique as the other 1000 peanut
| gallery enjoyers that have made the same astute observation
| before you. Congratulations. But you're absolutely missing the
| point.
| turtlebits wrote:
| If all you need is compute, than yeah, self hosting is easy.
| Otherwise, do you think just about every company under the sun is
| a sucker for being on the cloud? If it was so easy, companies
| would be either be constantly dropping prices to compete with all
| the self hosters, or new companies to fill in the price gaps.
| neilv wrote:
| There are many scenarios in which cloud providers (especially
| AWS) make sense.
|
| Ideally, your company has technical experts who can do quite a
| lot of things _non_ -cloud, so you can make informed decisions
| about near-term costs, complexity, vendor lock-in, execution
| speed, etc.
|
| I'm especially a fan of cloud providers for early startups, which
| tend to be high on velocity, and low on workers. And the free
| credits programs often solve the early problem of being low on
| dollars.
| JCM9 wrote:
| This isn't a binary issue. I disagree with these "abandon the
| cloud" takes but do agree that most folks spend way way more than
| they should.
|
| The biggest threat to cloud vendors is that everyone wakes up
| tomorrow and cost optimizes the crap out of their infrastructure.
| I don't think it's hyperbolic to say that global cloud spending
| could drop by 50% in 3 months if everyone just did a good audit
| and cleaned up their deployments.
| busterarm wrote:
| Exactly this.
|
| We have to use cloud because we're at the low end of 10^5
| servers. Once you hit the high end of 10^3 this is really where
| you need to be.
|
| Everything we're doing is highly inefficient because of decades
| of fast and loose development by immature software
| engineers...and having components in the stack that did the
| same.
|
| If I had 5 years to rewrite and redesign the product to reflect
| today's computing reality, I could eliminate 90%+ of the cost.
| But I'll never get that kind of time. Not with 1000 more
| engineers and 1000 more years and the most willing customers.
|
| You might get lucky enough that you and a bunch of your
| customers are so fed up with your company that you get to
| create the competition.
| icameron wrote:
| You have over a 100,000 servers? How is this? This is wild to
| ponder. I can only guess your monthly bill is in the
| millions. Are you able to say the company?
| yobbo wrote:
| "100.000 servers" sounds like the entirety of 2008-era
| Google, but with today's 10-100x performance per server. It
| could be bigger than Dropbox or Netflix.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| > The biggest threat to cloud vendors is that everyone wakes up
| tomorrow and cost optimizes the crap out of their
| infrastructure
|
| Well there's no danger of that. Even with AWS telling you
| exactly how to save money (they have a thousand different
| dashboards showing you where you can save, and even support
| will tell you), it'll still take you months to work through all
| the cost optimization changes. Since it's annoying and
| complicated to do, most people won't do it.
|
| Their billing really is ridiculous. We have a TAM and use a
| reseller, and it's virtually impossible for us to see what we
| actually spend each month, what with the reseller discounts,
| enterprise PPA, savings plans, RIs, and multiple accounts.
| Their support reps even built us some kinda custom BI tool just
| to look at costs, and it's still not right.
| JCM9 wrote:
| Yes, the partner resale model of AWS has been a total mess
| for a while.
| johnea wrote:
| The idea that it's cheaper not to use AWS is clear.
|
| I was hoping to see more about porting AWS proprietary features
| into generic servers.
|
| A big part of the problem isn't just monthly rent, it's vendor
| lock-in. When your whole system is implemented using AWS specific
| features, you're not going to run anywhere else.
|
| AWS, and any other third party vendor, can and does obsolete
| features. Then you're having to port your system just to keep it
| running on the third party service.
|
| Once you're implemented in a generic server, in a VPS, or your
| mom's basement, you're free to move to any other hosting
| provider, data center, whatever.
|
| The loss of understanding that 3rd party dependencies are not
| good for your company or project, seems a bigger loss to the
| technical community than FTP hacking...
| tamimio wrote:
| Why it feels like the author is too young and just had breaking
| discovery that he can have servers without clouds!? Always been a
| thing, clouds were/are used in areas where it would be better,
| say some integration with already existing infrastructure, or
| some quick scaling. Just like everything, there's always upside
| and downside, and it's just about what suits your needs. The
| author should next try an on-prem approach where he even controls
| the hardware, even more cheaper but with extra maintenance. For
| example, I found a used server a while ago (44 Core HP Z840
| WorkStation Dual Xeon E5-2699 V4 512GB RAM) for around $1000,
| that's a one time pay.
| system2 wrote:
| Sometimes I think I am out of the loop for using dedicated
| servers like OVH, DigitalOcean, and Hetzner, while others spend
| thousands of dollars for the things I spend barely a few hundred.
| This always made me think I am not a good developer enough to
| know the cutting-edge things others know.
|
| Turns out most of the developers suck at handling barebones with
| a Linux distro + nginx and some other plugins to do the same
| things as the fancy-named aws stuff. If you are in the same boat,
| just know that most of these developers suck at what they are
| doing and don't care about the company budget.
|
| You can get 99.99% of the things done with barebone + Cloudflare,
| including multiserver redundancy, at a fraction of AWS and Azure
| costs. Most of these technologies are just fancy words for basic
| Linux services.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| I always thought it was because they were working at a huge
| scale... but who knows.
| cbrake wrote:
| For me, it is a lot simpler to host at Linode (or simpler) than
| figure out the AWS/GCP crazy complex IAM stuff.
|
| However, there are cases where being able to spin down the
| server, and not pay for downtime is useful - like 36-core Yocto
| build machines.
| arcfour wrote:
| I've always found AWS IAM quite simple, but then again it is my
| job, so I might be biased. I haven't really dug into GCP well
| enough to understand it, but I did find it quite daunting to
| start the few times I messed with it. What's complex about it
| to you?
|
| For personal projects, honestly, the built in roles AWS
| provides are okay enough for some semblance of least privilege
| x functionality IMO.
|
| Plus, most of AWS's documentation tells you the specific policy
| JSON to use if you need to do XYZ thing, just fill in the
| blanks.
| sholladay wrote:
| I think the main thing holding people back from leaving the cloud
| is simple inertia. There was a time when the cloud was obviously
| the right choice. Static IPv4 addresses were becoming scarce,
| IPv6 had not been deployed widely enough, and cloud providers
| made it easy to stand up a server and some storage with high
| speed links on the cheap. But over time, things have changed.
| Rate limits, data caps, and egress fees are now normal (and
| costly). IPv6 is now deployed widely enough that you might be
| willing to just run an IPv6-only stack, which greatly simplifies
| running a server on-premise. And of course, we've all seen time
| and again how providers will carelessly lock out your cloud
| account for arbitrary reasons with little to no recourse. The
| time has come to own your infrastructure again. But that won't
| happen until people realize it's easy to do.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| A 2024 International LT Series semi-truck costs $130,000. That's
| very expensive compared to a $30,000 Ford Maverick.
|
| Both of these trucks can _technically_ be used to pick up
| groceries and commute. But, uh, if you bought the _semi-truck_ to
| get groceries and commute? Nobody scammed you; you bought the
| wrong truck. You don 't have to buy the biggest, most expensive
| truck to do small jobs. But also, just because there's a cheaper
| truck available, doesn't mean the semi-truck is overpriced or a
| scam. The semi is more expensive for a reason.
|
| I wonder about people who write articles like these. I imagine at
| one point he believed he _had_ to use the cloud, so he started
| using it without understanding what he was doing. As a result, he
| was charged a ton of money. He then found out there were cheaper,
| simpler ways to do what he wanted. And so, feeling hurt,
| embarrassed, and deceived, he writes this long screed, accusing
| people of scamming him - I mean scamming _you_ - because _you_
| (not him!) could not possibly need to use the cloud, even though
| _you_ (not him!) assumed you had to use the cloud.
|
| Yes, dude. The cloud is expensive. Sorry you found out the hard
| way. And for what it's worth, you don't need a datacenter either;
| stick a 1U in your closet and call it a day.
| throwaway106382 wrote:
| Basically it boils down to:
|
| Is your time worth more than what the fully managed services on
| AWS cost? And I mean that quite literally in the sense of your
| billable hours.
|
| If you like spending time tinkering with manually configuring
| linux servers, and don't have anything else that generates better
| value for you to do - by all means go for it.
|
| For small pet projects with no customers, a cheap Hetzner box is
| probably fine. For serious projects with customers that expect
| you to be able to get back on your feet quickly when shit hits
| the fan, or teams of developers that lose hours of productivity
| when a sandbox environment goes down, maybe not so much.
|
| Is AWS more expensive than the salary of the infra guy you would
| need to hire to do all this stuff by hand? Probably not.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Well, this sounds wildly out of touch. Companies using Hetzner
| cloud or servers having thousands of customers and paying
| 50-100 people are running just fine, but you labeled them a
| "small pet project". Provisioning new servers works just fine
| via API when you need it.
|
| Source: I worked at such a company.
| natertux wrote:
| After a few months of experimenting on AWS, I got scared seeing
| how fast small side projects could turn into expensive monthly
| bills.
|
| I built my own DIY cloud, a minimal self-hosted setup that lets
| me deploy apps, databases, and backups on cheap VPS or bare-metal
| servers. At first I just wanted to save money, but I realized
| that managing it can easily become a full-time SRE job.
|
| Still, for small, experimental, or hobby projects, this setup
| works perfectly. It keeps costs predictable and gives full
| control without needing large-scale infrastructure.
|
| https://diy-cloud.remikeat.com
|
| Would love to hear from others who tried leaving managed clouds
| behind.
| ufmace wrote:
| I don't particularly like this article, mostly because he seems
| to have spent the great majority of it ranting about people on
| the internet supposedly yelling at him about not being "on the
| cloud" and semantics about exactly what constitutes "the cloud".
| I'd be much more interested in reading exactly what he was
| spending that money on at AWS and how he moved it all onto one or
| a few bare-metal boxes.
|
| I don't think AWS is particularly expensive at all. In fact, it's
| rather cheap at quite a few things if you know what you're doing
| and use the right services. I've got all my server backups going
| to S3, for which I pay a whopping penny a month. I also host a
| handful of Docker images on ECR for 7 cents a month - way cheaper
| than any other private hosting service I know of.
|
| Now RDS, and the equivalent at every other hosting provider I
| know of, gets quite pricey indeed. IMO, you shouldn't bother
| unless you have pretty serious needs for reliability and speed.
| Apt install your DB server of choice on bare metal goes quite
| far. Or possibly pull a container of it into whatever you're
| using to manage containers.
| umrashrf wrote:
| This exactly what was happening with me and I recently started a
| project called Postbase to setup my own cloud infrastructure.
| There is so much free OSS software out there which is 100x better
| than what Google, Amazon and other offer.
| github.com/umrashrf/postbase (this is in alpha and work in
| progress).
| fathermarz wrote:
| I'm fundamentally confused. A server in a datacenter is still the
| cloud. Taking something off the cloud means you have hardware
| somewhere that you physically manage and pay the power bill.
|
| This is simply collapsing the built for scale tools into a
| cacophony of open source tools.
|
| You didn't need it to begin with, you just didn't know any
| better.
| alrs wrote:
| I'm going to go way out on a limb and offer: whatever it is
| that you are, it isn't "confused."
| arecsu wrote:
| Your response clearly shows that you didn't read the article.
| There's literally a section where it goes through your point.
| gethly wrote:
| I see articles likes these popping up recently quite a bit.
|
| I love it!
|
| FUCK CLOUD!
| yigalirani wrote:
| What if the data center that has your dedicated server burns
| down? You need to prepare to that buy renting another server at a
| different data center and synching them. Not a big problem, but
| needs to be mentioned
| hshdhdhehd wrote:
| Correct AWS gives you availability zones. It is easy to spin up
| a cluster over them and have little or no downtime.
|
| But a burning data centre is just one problem. Another is e.g.
| the USE1 issue AWS had. AZ didnt help here. Having compute in a
| other region an rerouting might. But maybe we aint talking
| startup concerns here. (If you have a simple enough "app" just
| deploy again in another region and update dns.)
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Up to a point, cloud can actually be very cost effective. If you
| are a small company, you don't actually need a lot. I ran our
| current service for almost one and a half year on Google Cloud
| Run for free. It stayed below the freemium threshold. Eventually
| I transitioned it over to two simple VMs. Main reason for this
| was that I abused these servers to also do background processing
| and Cloud Run is not very suitable for that as it can shut down
| servers in between requests and/or starve them of resources. But
| a small vm only costs something like 20$/month. Add another 25 or
| so for the load balancer and a Redis, and a few other bits and
| we're looking at ~100$ per month. That's very reasonable. That's
| not a cost worth optimizing without a very good reason. A good
| devops freelance person asks more per hour than that.
|
| Where a lot of companies go wrong is premature scaling and
| overengineering. As you might guess from the above, I don't run
| kubernetes. Reason, the smallest cluster I can manage would
| probably be more expensive than the entirety of my setup. Before
| I even deploy anything. And it might not be big enough even.
|
| I also don't run a managed postgresql. I'd like to. But I can't
| justify dropping north of 300$/month on that currently. A single
| node vm with backups is good enough. For now. I might go active
| master - passive master. Do I need a 3 or more node cluster? Not
| right now. I might one day. I always have the option to upgrade.
| But until then my DB is going to not break the bank. So, I run
| with a more modest/risky setup. It's a managed risk. I can buy it
| off when that becomes relevant.
|
| The other day, our CEO vibe coded a cost calculator thingy. He
| did a nice job. It had to be deployed somewhere. So, I used Cloud
| Run. Running a small thing with essentially no traffic is as
| close to free as you can get. I slapped some basic authentication
| on it and used a git hub action that we run from the freemium
| allocated build minutes each month. I reviewed our Github bills a
| few days ago over the years: The most we payed was a few months
| where we were running out of build minutes in 2024. I payed
| 55cents for one of those bills. Our setup is cloud based but
| frugal. I could probably lower our bills by double digit
| percentages by moving everything into Hetzner. But it's literally
| not worth my time.
|
| Cloud on the cheap is just really good value. You can host low
| traffic static websites on Cloudflare. If you have a load
| balancer in Google cloud (25$/month or so) you can use buckets
| and their CDN for next to nothing as an alternative. A small
| Redis costs next to nothing. We run a slightly expensive vm for
| batch jobs for a maybe ~2 hours per month in total. Each job only
| takes a few minutes. The machine is suspended in between jobs and
| we only pay for the hours it runs. Next to nothing.
|
| So, yes, you can get some bare metal in Hetzner or wherever for
| next to nothing. But then you need to manage that setup and you
| need to put the time in to do that. Your time even if you don't
| value it personally is just about the most scarce and expensive
| resource a startup has if you are the CTO. The difference between
| you doing valuable work that moves the company forward or you
| procrastinating and penny pinching over stuff that does not
| matter can literally make or break the company.
|
| If you spend 5K on infrastructure per month, that's a the same as
| a very low salary for a full time person. If you are spending
| that much, definitely do something because it's an obscene
| amount. Especially if you are early stage and have no traffic.
| But if you need to put somebody on that that costs closer to
| 10K/month for a few weeks or months, that's a project that has a
| pretty high price tag as well. So cutting 5K down to 1K is worth
| doing. But spending 10K to cut 1K to 500/month is probably going
| to take you years to earn back. And you lose time doing it.
|
| Our startup is bootstrapped. We run on a bit of revenue now and
| our savings for most of the past five years. Anything I spend on
| stuff that isn't needed literally is money that otherwise would
| go to my bank account (via a salary raise or bonus). I understand
| frugality. A lot of this stuff is people getting spoiled with
| investor cash and spending like there is no tomorrow. If you have
| no accountability you optimize the infrastructure for how good it
| makes your resume look, not for cost.
| skwee357 wrote:
| I never understood the appeal of AWS like cloud for non
| corporate. Sure, when you run a BigCo, you have all the money and
| people to throw at big cloud providers, obtaining pointless
| certificates, and configuring obscure IAM roles.
|
| But why small businesses like them, I can't I understand. I host
| all my stuff on Hetzner. It's easy, it's affordable and I "move
| fast". I don't need certificates to be able to manage the
| servers, and there is tone of information available online. But
| maybe it's because I'm old, and I used to ssh to a Linux machine,
| git pull the latest version, and call in a "deploy". But modern
| developed seems to be afraid of raw machines.
|
| The only thing I miss is a good transactional email provider with
| PAYG pricing, and EU data residency.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| "Hey bob from finance, I heard you want a new bi and
| dashboarding system to help us make better strategy choices?
| here's 200k, hire devs, infra spend can be billed to this
| project id"
|
| It's a paperwork thing, not a financial decision.
| mrweasel wrote:
| While I love a good cloud bashing, it's really not black and
| white. If you're really small, it probably doesn't matter much if
| you're using Hetzner or AWS, but co-location might be a bit to
| expensive. If you run an absolutely massive company, cloud vs.
| self-hosted comes down to whether or not you can build tooling as
| good as AWS, GCP or Azure, with all the billing infrastructure
| and reporting.
|
| The issues are mostly in the SME segment and where it really
| depends on what your business is. Do you need completely separate
| system for each customer? In that case, AWS is going to be easier
| and probably cheaper. Are you running a constant low 24/7? Then
| you should consider buying your own servers.
|
| It's really hard to apply a blanket conclusion to all industries,
| in regards to cloud cost and whether or not it's worth it. My
| criticism in regards to opting for cloud is that people want all
| the benefits of the cloud, but not use any of the features,
| because that would lock them into e.g. AWS. If you're using AWS
| as a virtual machine platform only, there's always going to be
| cheaper (and maybe better) options.
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| If you have high volume traffic depending on time of month, ie
| finance around ultimo/primo, you might need to scale your
| performance to 5-10x your normal idle load.
|
| If running on your own data center, or renting physical/virtual
| machines from ie Hetzner, you will pay for that capability
| overhead for 30.5 days per month, when in reality you only need
| it for 2-3 days.
|
| With the cloud you can simply scale dynamically, and while you
| end up paying more for the capacity, you only pay when you use
| it, meaning you save money for most of the month.
| amrocha wrote:
| You can use the cloud to dynamically scale when needed while
| still running most of your own infra, best of both worlds.
|
| Tricky networking though.
| sofixa wrote:
| > Tricky networking though.
|
| And data storage/locality/consistency.
| amrocha wrote:
| Databases are rarely the bottleneck during access volume
| spikes in my experience. It's really impressive how far
| some beefy servers and a read copy can take you.
|
| But if that is your bottleneck you should be upgrading
| your DB system regardless of whether you're on cloud or
| bare metal.
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| But if your one source of truth is a single huge
| database, maybe on a mainframe, as is often the case with
| finance, and eventual consistency is a huge no go, the
| mainframe can become a limit regardless when you're being
| "hammered" by 3+ million users all wanting to check their
| account balance.
|
| Yes, you can solve the problem with sharding and other
| tricks, but for many banks, the mainframe is still their
| main data storage, and it has 60+ years of legacy code on
| it that is not easily or quickly migrated to modern
| architecture.
| amrocha wrote:
| I agree with that, but I don't understand how that's
| particularly relevant to a bare metal vs cloud
| discussion.
|
| Wouldn't you need to do the work to shard regardless of
| where you're running?
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| Banks running on mainframes don't shard. They just throw
| more hardware at the problem. The modern mainframes
| capacity for raw IO is insane, and much higher than what
| you can achieve with any PC setup. More hardware, more
| bandwidth, client facing applications in the cloud,
| database on the mainframe.
|
| The major difference lies in infrastructure, particularly
| networking infrastructure. With cloud providers like
| Azure, AWS, etc, you can provision your vnet layout, and
| scale "indefinitely" on the same infrastructure. You
| don't need to provision new hosts, setup new secrets, or
| anything like that.
|
| If a data center goes down, you can relatively easy
| switch to another one, though most financial institutions
| I know of uses hot/cold setups as hot/hot is essentially
| twice the money, and they rarely go down for long.
|
| Of course it's all just regular servers underneath, so
| anything possible with AWS and Azure is also possible
| with other cloud providers, but the tooling simply isn't
| there (yet?).
|
| Another issue is ISO auditor compliance. Being a
| regulated industry, finance (in EU at least) needs
| certain compliance to be fulfilled, not only regarding
| the services you consume, but also stuff like the
| physical locations, or being able to physically inspect
| the data center if auditors require it.
|
| Microsoft and Amazon has this nailed. I've yet to
| experience a EU data center not run by FAANG meet the
| requirements, not that they can't. My best hope so far is
| probably "Lidl cloud" (forgot the name).
| sundache wrote:
| > If running on your own data center, or renting
| physical/virtual machines from ie Hetzner, you will pay for
| that capability overhead for 30.5 days per month, when in
| reality you only need it for 2-3 days.
|
| I keep seeing this take on here and it just shows most people
| don't actually know what you can do off the cloud. Hertzner
| allows you to rent servers by the hour, so you can just do
| that and only pay for the 2-3 days you need them.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Also the GP take is kinda silly, because one pays 5-10x
| with the typical cloud providers in the first place, so it
| would be totally fine to pay that and already have it, if
| one is willing to spend that much.
|
| More likely load will spread over time for most scenarios
| and the server will be ready to handle that with lower
| hardware specs.
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| There's a reason i specifically mentioned finance, where
| the end and start of a month is a lot more busy than the
| middle of the month, as in factor 10+.
|
| People receive paychecks, pay bills, buy stuff, with
| holidays (christmas, x-mas, etc) being even busier.
|
| Load does not even out, and when you have 3 million
| customers or more, the load is not really insignificant.
| Nor can you just delay it, or rely on eventual
| consistency.
| sundache wrote:
| But most hosting providers allow you to just rent a
| server for a day or a few hours, so it's not really an
| argument why you have to use the cloud.
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| The actual hardware (or virtual these days) is not the
| problem, but getting the 5000-10000 services properly
| connected with auditing, credentials and more is more
| trouble than most people expect.
|
| Finance is a heavily regulated industry, so there's a LOT
| of compliance that needs to happen, like segregation of
| duty, traceability, accountability, and other ilities.
|
| Yes, it would probably cost less to run on Hetzner
| (provided their ISO audits are approved by financial
| authorities), but dynamically spinning up and down
| servers would cost more.
|
| You also need fallback plans (regulated industry,
| critical infrastructure, etc).
|
| It has literally taken years to get AWS and Azure
| approved in EU.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Anything that wants to adhere to GDPR should still be
| very careful, if not outright avoid, AWS and Azure. At
| most one could use an EU-isolated offspring of them,
| otherwise one runs into the insanity of US laws. The fact
| that many businesses don't care doesn't make it right.
| t_mann wrote:
| In principle, you don't even need a "server", ie purpose-built
| hardware like what he's showing. An old laptop will be fine for
| many projects, although I'd be interested if someone can help put
| a perspective on how to decide whether your specific project/load
| will be too much for your specific hardware. My bigger concern
| with 'true' self-hosting would be how to get a good/reliable
| enough internet connection.
| ROOFLES wrote:
| Our infra runs on 2 12-Year old shitbox Poweredges. so yeah
| most is just overkill.
| t_mann wrote:
| Cool! It's still purpose-built hardware, but cool to hear
| such stories. Do you use colocation in a data center?
| austin-cheney wrote:
| The article featured _The Server Store_. It's a north Texas
| company local to where I live. I have purchased all my personal
| computers from there for about the past decade.
| deepsummer wrote:
| I recently had the same realization and moved all my functions to
| a simple stand-alone server. Besides the normal AWS costs, what
| scares me most about AWS is the possibility that someone could
| try to DOS me, leaving me with a huge AWS bill, because there is
| no real way to limit AWS spending.
|
| The main reason why I keep coming back to cloud providers is
| databases. I don't feel comfortable setting up a high-
| availability db setup, and I don't want the responsibility of
| managing backups. But if you go to, say, Hetzner, you won't be
| able to use a cloud database in the same network.
| flarco wrote:
| Another complement to easily moving data off cloud, check out
| https://github.com/slingdata-io/sling-cli. Use CLI, YAML or
| Python to run etl jobs.
| vijucat wrote:
| I took care of IT for a startup hedge fund once. I was the
| quant's right-hand man, data engineer, visualization dashboard
| guy, everything. The quant needed to run a monolithic C++ program
| daily to chew through stock data and we decided a dual-Xeon
| server with 512 GB RAM would be great. OVH MG-512, for those
| curious.
|
| Quant happy, boss happy, all good. Then the boss goes for lunch
| with someone and comes back slightly disturbed. We were not
| buzzword compliant. Apparently the other guy made him feel that
| he was using outdated tech by not being on AWS, using auto-
| scaling etc;
|
| Here I am, from a background where my first language was 8086
| assembly, and compactness was important to me. I remember
| thinking, "This whole thing could run on a powerful calculator,
| except for the RAM requirement".
|
| It was a good lesson for me. Most CTOs know this bias and have
| unnecessarily huge and wasteful budgets but make sure they keep
| the business heads happy in the comfort that the firm is buzzword
| compliant. Efficiency and compactness are a marketing liability
| for IT heads!
| jimbokun wrote:
| I would think a quant would understand arithmetic.
|
| Did you try crunching some of the numbers with him? I would
| hope a quant could also understand following the common wisdom
| can sometimes cost you more.
| deaux wrote:
| > To them, it's way too convenient to be on AWS: not only it
| solves their problem, but it's also a shiny object. It's
| technically complex, it makes them look smart in front of other
| devs, it creates dependencies and lock-in effects so they're not
| easily replaceable as employees, and most importantly - being on
| the cloud yields them a fat paycheck at the end of the month.
|
| I recently read a fantastic comment or article on how developers,
| and IT workers in general, will be the first to be automated
| away, and groups like lawyers and doctors the last, entirely
| unrelated to how good LLMs and other AI models are at the
| specific tasks of each. Reason being that developers fall over
| themselves to prove how productive they are, happy to use all
| these tools. Anywhere else is concerned with job protection first
| and foremost. Metrics like SLOC having come from devs themselves
| in the chase of a raise.
|
| This paragraph reminds me of that so much. Calling out those who
| push the cloud for job security. In basically every other sector
| - where this kind of behavior is 10x more prevalent - no one
| calls this out, there's a sense of solidarity and mutual
| understanding that this kind of thing is necessary.
|
| This isn't judging one or the other to be good or bad. But it's
| going to cost devs very dearly.
|
| I don't remember where I read it, they put it much better than I
| can - if anyone here recognizes it please drop a link.
| m4r1k wrote:
| yes but most of dude's websites are not loading and some are even
| without SSL in 2025.. https://imgur.com/a/irWADuq
| themafia wrote:
| > You've been scammed, likely not out of your own money, but your
| employer's money - and that's why you don't give a crap.
|
| No, I've ran the numbers, and in doing so, realized that EC2 is
| the wrong solution for most problems. If you use the correct
| solution the price is highly competitive with your servers. One
| of the reasons being, I do not need to maintain servers.. I did
| that for 25 years and I absolutely hate it. The amount of time I
| save, which my company pays for, is ridiculous. I get a powerful
| security model, a unified API for managing everything, and
| expertly managed runtimes.
|
| You're acting as if people only making $4k/mo in salary are
| making these decisions. You've got startup brain. Come back down
| to earth and reassess your position.
|
| > you're looking to save for the long run. Well, turns out buying
| your own servers is even cheaper in a long enough time frame
|
| Yet another process I don't have to waste time on. "Capital
| purchasing" is extremely annoying (by design) in every single
| organization I've ever worked for or consulted with.
|
| Like most "cloud cost analysis" this is extremely shallow and is
| apparently based upon the supposed "virality" of a single tweet.
| time4tea wrote:
| Its true that aws is very expensive for a lot of use cases, as
| long as you only count the cost of the servers.
|
| However, in most (every?) large organisations, buying a server
| and putting it in a DC, and looking after it, is hugely time-
| consuming, lengthy and expensive.
|
| You need to get quotes, approvals, purchase, rack, commission,
| maintain etc etc. It is usually close to 1 year to get a server.
|
| In some companies, even getting a virtual server takes almost as
| long!
|
| With AWS, once an account and service is approved, boom, you are
| done.
| hosh wrote:
| The article was talking about solo devs, small businesses, and
| startups. A few physical servers that can handle millions of
| request per day.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| Let's not forget capex/opex. You can bill an aws project to a
| project, datacenter costs or shared across the entire org and
| it's prohibitively complicated to budget these per project.
|
| Sure you can do it cheaper, but money isn't really the problem.
| Most cloud spend is less than the cost of a handful of senior
| devs a month.
| dax_ wrote:
| My experience is exactly the opposite (company with more than
| 10k employees). Getting anything done in Azure takes me 10x as
| long, as all of Azure is managed by one team, and everything
| requires approvals, lots of bureaucracy. Also, as it turns out,
| it is extremely expensive. Per our guidelines everything needs
| to be isolated within company intranet (unless really required
| to be external), which often means we need premium tier
| services in Azure. These are really, really pricey sometimes.
|
| On the other hand, if I request a virtual server, it takes less
| than a week, and I can work with it much more freely.
| mythz wrote:
| We've moved to Hetzner several years ago, and the savings will
| ensure we'll likely never consider the Cloud again (Exception is
| Cloudflare Workers, which is well done with generous quotas).
| Although it would be way easier to move now since automation,
| deployment, backup and retention scripts are much faster to write
| now with AI.
|
| BTW in-case you've missed it [1] Anthropic is offering $250 free
| credits till Nov 18 for their new Claude Code on the Web [2] for
| Clause Pro/Max users.
|
| [1] https://x.com/adocomplete/status/1985766988724244839
|
| [2] https://claude.ai/code
| san1t1 wrote:
| Love a nice 'single box project'.
|
| But as soon as you start dealing with data sovereignty for your
| SaaS app, and need co-lo's in multiple geographies, each with
| their own contract/billing cycles, HA and backup, the global
| reach and consistency of the cloud providers starts seeming quite
| compelling again.
| ramon156 wrote:
| Good topic, horrible ai emdash slop. There's so much fuss here
| that I wouldn't be surprised if it was just a prompt without any
| reviewing.
|
| I'd much rather read an article to know when it's NOT relevant to
| switch. Someone other than "vendor/service lock-in". I already
| know that
| spacecadet wrote:
| Local first! Someone else said, "You don't actually need any of
| those things until you no longer have a "project", but a business
| which will allow you to pay for the things you require." --
| Similar response I have for clients and engineers when they waste
| time/energy/money on "scale" when we are building a prototype...
| "scale is a luxury that comes with revenue."
|
| Im sure some of you may quip back, "it takes money to make
| money". No shit. Just dont get high on your own supply... Be
| smart, be scrappy, slow down.
| jwr wrote:
| This is all correct. I've been running my own servers for many
| years now, keeping things simple and saving a lot of money and
| time (setting anything up in AWS or Azure is horribly complicated
| and the UIs are terrible).
|
| One thing to remember is that you do need to treat your servers
| as "cloud servers" in the sense that you should be able to re-
| generate your entire setup from your configuration at any time,
| given a bunch of IPs with freshly-installed base OSs. That means
| ansible or something similar.
|
| If you insist on using cloud (virtual) servers, do yourself a
| favor and use DigitalOcean, it is simple and direct and will let
| you keep your sanity. I use DO as a third-tier disaster recovery
| scenario, with terraform for bringing up the cluster and the same
| ansible setup for setting everything up.
|
| I am amused by the section about not making friends saying this
| :-) -- most developer communities tend to develop a herd
| mentality, where something is either all the rage, or is "dead",
| and people are afraid to use their brains to experiment and make
| rational decisions.
|
| Me, I'm rather happy that my competitors fight with AWS/Azure
| access rights management systems, pay a lot of money for hosting
| and network bandwith, and then waste time on Kubernetes because
| it's all the rage. I'll stick to my boring JVM-hosted Clojure
| monolith, deployed via ansible to a cluster of physical servers
| and live well off the revenue from my business.
| le-mark wrote:
| Have you written about your app and revenue anywhere we can
| read about it? Looks interesting.
| cinntaile wrote:
| The only people writing about their revenue are online
| business influencers.
| jwr wrote:
| That seems to be quite true, as people who run a successful
| and enjoyable business are busy running their successful
| and enjoyable business :-)
| brandall10 wrote:
| "Building in public" is a reasonable marketing tactic, I
| wouldn't discount it entirely.
| jwr wrote:
| Marketing tactics only work if they reach your customers,
| and HN readers are generally not my customers.
| brandall10 wrote:
| I was addressing the "people who run a successful and
| enjoyable business" comment, not you specifically.
| piokoch wrote:
| This is all true. But... But if you manage your own server, as
| the author advice, you need to figure out a lot of stuff and
| remember about a lot of stuff.
|
| Are ulimits set correctly?
|
| Shall I turn on syn cookies or turn them off because of
| performance?
|
| What are the things I should know but I don't and Chat GPT has
| not told me them, as this is more than some intro tutorial on
| how to run VPS on DO, so it was never indexed by Chat GPT and
| alikes.
|
| Is all of my software on the server up to date? Is there any
| library I use exploited, zero day attacks are on me too,
| blocking bots, etc. What if I do some update but it will turn
| out that my Postgres version is not working correctly anymore?
| This is all my problem.
|
| What if I need to send emails? These days doing this ourselves
| is a dark art by itself (IP/domain address warming up, checking
| if my domain has not ended on some spam list, etc.).
|
| What if I need to follow some regulations, like European Union
| GDPR compliance? Have I done everything what is needed to store
| personal data as GDPR requires? Is my DB password stored in a
| compliant way or I will face a fine up to 10% of my incomes.
|
| This is not black/white situation as the author tries to
| present and those who use cloud services are not dumbards who
| are buying some IT version of snake oil.
| fluoridation wrote:
| >What if I need to send emails? These days doing this
| ourselves is a dark art by itself (IP/domain address warming
| up, checking if my domain has not ended on some spam list,
| etc.).
|
| AFAIK, everyone sending automated emails just uses one of the
| paid services, like sendmail.
|
| >What if I need to follow some regulations, like European
| Union GDPR compliance? Have I done everything what is needed
| to store personal data as GDPR requires? Is my DB password
| stored in a compliant way or I will face a fine up to 10% of
| my incomes.
|
| What does this have to do with cloud vs non-cloud? You'll
| need to manage your data correctly either way.
| Blahagun wrote:
| Setting up the email server is the only thing I couldn't do
| with my own home hosted setup because you're at the mercy of
| your internet provider to give you the PTR record in their
| network, and lately many providers outright refuse to do it
| for "your own and their own safety" reasons. This thing alone
| could be the difference between deciding to host yourself or
| use a cloud service.
| bsenftner wrote:
| Just use the Postmark web service API, cheap, reliable, and
| far more if one really wants to lean into email with their
| online service. https://postmarkapp.com/email-api
| Blahagun wrote:
| I am aware of the tons of subscription based email
| services but that is not the point here. What good is
| self hosting when you still need to rely on some external
| paid service for a trivial thing like an email server?
| The costs add up.
| bsenftner wrote:
| Except email is not trivial, it's a time vampire I'm
| happy to pay $15 a month to not have to deal with.
| amtamt wrote:
| Isn't this long list applied to cloud hosted VMs as well?
| jwr wrote:
| All of this is true both for dedicated servers and cloud-
| hosted VMs.
|
| This list looks like FUD, to be honest, trying to scare
| people. Yes, you should be scared of these things, but none
| of them are magically solved by hosting your stuff in
| AWS/Azure/Google or any other could provider du jour.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Some of them are solved by using managed-services that
| abstract away the messy config / security ops stuff.
|
| The blog entry was wordy and repetitive for what it
| expressed (AI?), but the cloud argument should boil down to
| a few simple questions: - Does it get you
| regulatory certifications you need? - Do you need to
| rapidly scale-up / scale-down? - Can you afford to
| hire the (minimal) necessary skills to self-administer
| servers? - Can you stay on top of security updates?
|
| Add all that together and you get a few customers who
| should be using the cloud: - Regulated
| companies who want to punt on certs/attestations -
| Small/medium growth-oriented startups (unknown needs, low
| headcount, focus on building product) - Companies
| with hardware demand volatility that exceeds their ability
| to provision it
|
| That's not "all companies" or "no companies" either way,
| but it is a very large number of companies who are paying
| cloud premiums without actually needing or benefiting from
| the cloud value add...
| ttkciar wrote:
| Yes, you will need to employ someone with basic system
| administration competence. That's a given.
|
| Cloud infra is touted as obviating the need to hire system
| administrators, but that's a marketing fabrication. Trying to
| manage infrastructure without the necessary in-house skills
| is a recipe for disaster, whether it's in the cloud or on-
| prem.
| bsenftner wrote:
| I was a guy that built server clusters during the early 00's,
| for my own and others' web and other projects. When AWS really
| took off, it was like a spend all your money mania, and devs
| and companies treated my skills like dirt. I got a job writing
| facial recognition edge servers, with high performance many
| claim are impossible numbers (25M face compares per second per
| core) and my employer found itself a leader in the industry.
| But customers could not wrap their heads around just a single
| box capable of our numbers (800M face compares per second, plus
| ingestion of 32 video streams) and to get sales the company
| ended up moving everything into AWS because customers did not
| trust anything else.
| MikeNotThePope wrote:
| Do you have any blog posts or something you could share on
| how facial recognition works? Specifically what a "face
| compare" is. That sounds interesting!
| bsenftner wrote:
| https://github.com/bsenftner/UnderstandingFacialRecognition
| /...
| kevlened wrote:
| > to get sales the company ended up moving everything into
| AWS because customers did not trust anything else
|
| This is a hidden cost of self-hosting for many in b2b. It's
| not just convincing management, it's convincing your clients.
| easton wrote:
| That's interesting. Except for $GIGANTIC_CO (like, BofA, or
| the government), i'd expect a SLA that describes service
| resiliency and not "well, our service will be up because
| we're on AWS".
|
| Why would you need to disclose your hosting provider? is
| that really a concern for hosted services (and if it is,
| why isn't the customer hosting it in their cloud?)
| bsenftner wrote:
| Most customers do not want to host anything if they can
| prevent it. My employer was selling the servers that host
| the entire shebang, and most did not want to host them.
| We'd explain they'd save a lot by hosting and
| viewing/streaming everything locally, but their IT people
| were not comfortable, and their execs wanted to see
| everything on their phones when not at work. We made it
| all plug and play, and still they wanted to pay 10-20X
| more for a web service.
| TeeMassive wrote:
| How many clients do you have?
| psnosignaluk wrote:
| Pre-cloud pets vs cattle approach. We ran a few pets, but had
| DC's worth of cattle thanks to PXE, TFPT and Ansible. No
| Terraform required, as there was no need to control the state
| of multiples of cloud cruft. Good times. Except when something
| would pack up in the middle of winter in the wee hours and it
| was a bollock-cracking motorbike ride to the DC to spit on the
| offending black box.
| immibis wrote:
| Even if you don't end up switching, the lesson from this person's
| experience and the comments here on HN is: Stop being afraid.
|
| People make all sorts of excuses: it's not secure, it's not
| reliable, it doesn't scale. These are primarily people who have
| never touched a server. If they had, they would know actual
| tradeoffs instead of excuses. So go and touch a server and learn
| how it works.
| lars512 wrote:
| Hetzner is great if you're in Europe, is there an equivalent in
| the US or East Asia?
| matt-p wrote:
| Not exactly like for like, but if you checkout comparison sites
| like https://serversearcher.com there are options that come
| close, like $6 for 4GB/2cores in many US locations.
| sylens wrote:
| How much is your labor worth though? The actual cost of a server
| is not expensive; the maintenance behind it is. If I have a fleet
| of 10 EC2 instances, I can keep them patched with Systems Manager
| without having to build any of that automation myself.
| brodouevencode wrote:
| As with everything, the real answer as to whether or not the
| cloud is cheaper is "it depends". These simplistic one-sided
| tirades (intentionally?) leave out a lot of detail, use simple
| rage-bait titles, and are generally not very thoughtful or
| coherent.
| hansvm wrote:
| Jumping away from the article slightly, where would you go if you
| needed a ton of vanilla disk space, the ability to do compute
| near to that disk, and for it to be accessible with a reasonable
| pipe to the public internet?
|
| As far as I can tell, you'd almost have to do something with a
| colo if you didn't want to pay 10x or more for the storage. Are
| there other options?
| matt-p wrote:
| Well, is "a ton" a level that can fit in a dedicated server or
| many? Just looking at https://serversearcher.com you've got
| 72TB of storage on 10Gb pipe for $360 or so a month: 128 GB RAM
| 6c/12t E-2276G 2X 512GB NVME + 4X 18.0TB HDD 300TB / 10Gbps
| BirAdam wrote:
| You'd colo if you didn't want to use public cloud. The savings
| are good over time, but the upfront cost can be huge depending
| upon how much disk space you need. The setup/config can also be
| rough (many 4U boxes packed with tons of disks each, then
| CephFS + Rados for S3 api). You also want to have a few
| configured nodes on cold stand by, and many extra disks.
| Because of this, I've seen some companies take compute off the
| cloud but leave bulk data storage on the cloud.
| ratsimihah wrote:
| I'm not sold because:
|
| 1. "It's difficult to say these things without coming across as
| arrogant, but I've been managing servers since 2006."
|
| You have experience manager servers, so for you it's not a big
| deal. But maybe software developers who aren't devops don't want
| to worry about it and just want to write code and ship a project?
|
| 2. If you're launching a new product as a solo developer, isn't
| it faster to just build an MVP on the cloud, validate the idea,
| get some traction, and eventually migrate to cheaper hosting if
| you do become the x% that gets product/market fit and do need to
| scale?
|
| 3. "Look, first of all, you're as unique as the other 1000 peanut
| gallery enjoyers that have made the same astute observation
| before you. Congratulations. But you're absolutely missing the
| point."
|
| What's with the tone? Is it supposed to be funny? Does it help
| getting the point across?
| burnerzzzzz wrote:
| Webserver is down
| aoli-al wrote:
| It is hilarious to read the title: "I took all my projects off
| the cloud [...]" and then you click the link it says:
| "Webserver is down".
| rameerez wrote:
| It works just fine?
| aeblyve wrote:
| Host is erroring out, so webpage is down, per cloudflare.
|
| I'm quite sympathetic to on-prem but there's a possible argument
| against.
| Proofread0592 wrote:
| Engineering is all tradeoffs.
|
| For this guy who spent thousands per month on AWS, using AWS
| makes no sense.
|
| For a guy like me whose AWS bill was 38 cents last month, AWS
| makes a lot of sense. Currently I have a small KaiOS app with
| about 1000 unique visitors per month hosted on AWS. I used to
| self-host on an old laptop, but it costs less money to host on
| AWS (1 kwh cost me 19.89 cents and my laptop uses about 4.5kwh
| per month). Not to mention the convenience of not having to
| restart my server for software updates, or update my own certs
| every 3 months, or fuddling with nginx configurations.
|
| And my AWS bill ever starts climbing, I will just self host once
| again.
| weberer wrote:
| You could probably bring that down to 30 cents on
| nearlyfreespeech.net
| rkangel wrote:
| The irony is that I went to read this article and encountered the
| Cloudflare error "521: Web server is down".
| daniel1302 wrote:
| yeah it was bad move to take it off the cloud
| halamadrid wrote:
| I don't think it was designed to handle the volume of traffic
| that HN generates.
| executesorder66 wrote:
| A Cloudflare fronted website can't handle HN frontpage levels
| of traffic?
|
| Then why does anybody use cloudflare?
| tecleandor wrote:
| Probably bad cache headers configuration. Even with
| Cloudflare in front it could be forwarding every request to
| the backend if the cache headers are misconfigured...
| j7ake wrote:
| With the use of chat bots and agents, managing these on prem
| should be easier than ever right?
| BirAdam wrote:
| Just a bit of nitpicking. I am AWS certified, I still tell people
| not to do cloud. I even recommended as much to my current
| employer, laid out the costs for their architecture project doing
| on-prem, colo, and cloud (with multiple different cloud vendors),
| and they still chose AWS. At this point, the choice of cloud is
| nearly religious (in my observation).
| mike1o1 wrote:
| I have some projects with a fairly steady load that I'm currently
| running on a VPS on Digital Ocean. I have some non-critical ones
| that I'd be interested in moving to "bare metal" for learning
| purposes, but having a hard time figuring out what the transition
| from VPS to dedicated server would look like.
|
| Anybody have any guides or guidance on making the migration? I
| feel comfortable managing the VPS, but not sure what else I'd
| need to take on by moving to a dedicated server. I imagine
| hardware monitoring would be one, but what else?
| whatever1 wrote:
| How do you even get a static IP these days?
| BinaryIgor wrote:
| Great write-up :) I find hosting VPS on DigitialOcean/Hetzner to
| be the best middle-ground: you save a lot, but it still
| convenient; you just SSH into the thing, no need to think about
| physical cables, cooling, electricity and all the being physical
| baggage
| subarctic wrote:
| Having my own server in a datacenter would be cool, buy it's hard
| to imagine having side projects that I'm willingly spending $1400
| US/month on AWS for. Right now I'm still using the free tier on
| most platforms, plus a $14/month database on digital ocean that
| I'm not even using
| ugur2nd wrote:
| You won't believe it, but I can host 100 websites for a maximum
| of $100 per year.
|
| It may seem strange to you, but PHP servers work very well.
|
| I think it's worth a try.
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