[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Cloud providers are losing in favor of bare-...
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Ask HN: Cloud providers are losing in favor of bare-metal?
Lately, I've noticed a new trend on X: Devs (and indie hackers in
particular) are ditching cloud providers and jumping straight to
bare-metal servers like Hetzner. Honestly, I think the big cloud
companies just haven't kept up. Their services feel clunky compared
to the standalone alternatives. Just try comparing Vercel's dev
experience to Amplify's, and you'll see what I mean. On top of
that, AWS has gotten way stingier with startup credits. Put those
two together, and it's no surprise fewer people are hosting their
MVPs on AWS. It's tough to stay under $150/month with a database
and a server, while on bare metal you can grab 16 GB RAM for around
$20/month. - Do you think the cloud is actually losing ground? -
And for those using bare-metal: how do you handle DB backups,
CI/CD, and pulling logs? - Would you scale something using bare-
metal servers? [Carlos](https://github.com/clostao)
Author : clostao
Score : 15 points
Date : 2025-11-16 17:23 UTC (5 hours ago)
| curious_curios wrote:
| Given that AWS, Azure and GCP are all recording 20-40% YoY
| growth, no, I don't think they're losing ground.
|
| As for startup credits, they're still handing out $100-200k like
| candy if they deem you a serious startup. There was a lot of
| abuse in the past so they started putting up filters.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| Interesting that you call hetzner "bare metal". Most of their
| product offerings are cloud based VMs (and certainly for $20 a
| month you are getting shared hardware VMs). Do you think more
| devs are are actually buying hardware/servers or do you just mean
| devs are using VMs provided by smaller companies instead of the
| hyper scalers, when you say "bare metal".
| clostao wrote:
| True, more than bare-metal I meant dedicated servers on-premise
| kasey_junk wrote:
| Again that's a confusing line. Hetzner does not provide (as
| its main business) "on premise" options as id use that term.
|
| When you get dedicated servers from them, typically it's VMs
| on their machines, in their data centers and the hyper
| scalers have options just like that.
| bravetraveler wrote:
| Er, sorry to interject... incorrect:
| https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/
|
| Not interested in arguing a pointless distinction like '
| _main business '_. They apparently do everything, even
| colo. Want _a third_ of a rack or _full?_ If 'retail'
| metal is too pricey, try their _' server auction'_ with
| older equipment.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| I just want to know what the questioner means is all. I
| view on-prem as _not_ meaning in the providers data
| center.
|
| I view bare metal as meaning not virtualized.
|
| Another related but not identical dimension is dedicated
| or shared.
|
| Hetzner offers options in all those dimensions, but not
| in the price the question mentions.
| bravetraveler wrote:
| > Hetzner offers options in all those dimensions, but not
| in the price the question mentions.
|
| Again, incorrect _(sorry)_. $30 /m as opposed to $20.
| Their mistake, I suppose. /s Rhetorical: how that
| confuses the question for you, confuses me.
|
| Before we bemoan _' a 50% cost increase',_ consider: this
| _does_ get an additional _48GB of memory_ on the
| _dedicated_ non-virtualized box. See:
| https://www.hetzner.com/sb/
|
| So, IMO, the $10 on top of $20 is a pittance: literally
| multiplied the quoted memory, and for bonus points, a
| spare SSD. A small price to reduce administrivia and gain
| redundancy!
|
| This is part of the question: what does your value
| judgement look like? I suspect you're more interested in
| pedantry than answering this in good faith; you're
| clearly _somewhat_ familiar with the offerings.
|
| While I'm rambling/have the floor, some tangents. First,
| it hasn't made a lot of sense/cents to offer a dedicated
| _physical_ machine with 16GB of memory in _quite_ some
| time. Now, Cloud? Absolutely. Simplifies Tetris.
| Physical, though? A knock-off Tamagotchi might make more
| money after considering power, IPs, and sheer module
| density past DDR3.
|
| And, finally, I can see reason for hesitation with
| Hetzner. While I'm a happy customer, they're well-known
| for being _very_ thorough with identification during on-
| boarding. To the degree that many are uncomfortable.
| gkoz wrote:
| When you get dedicated servers from them that's exactly
| what you get: you're renting physical servers, which you
| manage yourself. And they've been in this business for
| decades. The VMs offering is much more recent.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| They have a cloud product called dedicated as well. I'm
| not sure what the questioner is arming about. I shouldn't
| have said it's their main business though.
| speedgoose wrote:
| I don't think so. Hetzner sees some growth but they are still
| very small.
|
| DB can have replicas and upload dumps to some S3 compatible
| object stores. Like in the cloud. CI/CD with stuff like gitlab
| and Argo CD is mostly the same. You can install some log
| monitoring stuff like the classic Elk stack. Or be old fashioned
| and use ssh and journalctl.
|
| I wouldn't attempt to automatically scale to the moon on bare
| metal, that won't happen. But a few beefy servers running k3s or
| similar can get you pretty far.
| dabinat wrote:
| I would say it depends on the effort to cost savings ratio. I
| moved my most expensive servers there because that's where it
| made the most sense. If it totals considerable amounts of money
| it is absolutely worth the extra effort, but it is not worth it
| if you only have a handful of t4g.mediums.
| viraptor wrote:
| It's just the meme of the year. There's nothing that changed
| really for quite a long time. Some cloud services provide things
| on a simplistic and easy way, some in complex and complete
| ecosystem. The same choice and the tradeoffs have always been
| there.
|
| The only change is that it's popular to write a "how we saved
| $$$" blog posts. Which actually could be read as "how we failed
| to do proper analysis and kept losing $$$ for years".
| interstice wrote:
| This would be quite funny since _I've been using bare metal the
| whole time_. But I don't think it's as simple as that.
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