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A URL shortener not shortening the URL but makes it look very dodgy

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Re: A URL shortener not shortening the URL but makes it look very dodgy

#12
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

„Turns out this site is powered by money. We ran out of Google App Engine credit. Fear not, we'll get more within 24 hours.“

Forgive my old-fashioned-ness, but... Why is metered cloud hosting a better choice here than a $5/mo. VPS?

Because credit is free and $5 is not free, I guess.

Re: A URL shortener not shortening the URL but makes it look very dodgy

#17
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

„Turns out this site is powered by money. We ran out of Google App Engine credit. Fear not, we'll get more within 24 hours.“

Forgive my old-fashioned-ness, but... Why is metered cloud hosting a better choice here than a $5/mo. VPS?

Personally, for long-running things, metered cloud has two upsides:

- IaaS, static hosting, etc. can maintain security updates on their end. My own VPS will eventually be broken into if I don't maintain security updates.

- Many things are accessed only intermittently. For low access patterns, it's cheaper to pay for what you use.

What I'd really like is something like Heroku, Amazon Lambda, or similar, but with an open, competitive ecosystem, and without vendor lock-in.

Re: A URL shortener not shortening the URL but makes it look very dodgy

#18
post #10
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgive my old-fashioned-ness, but... Why is metered cloud hosting a better choice here than a $5/mo. VPS?

In 99% of cases its not, people just mistakenly think they need a 'cloud' provider for everything these days.

For real. I once worked with a non-IT company who just had one junior developer responsible for everything IT, including websites and their management. When I asked why they don't run everything on some dedicated instance with X GB included in the plan instead of fancy bandwidth pricing so they have static sums to pay each month (reason I was pulled into the project was to decrease spending which increased each month as traffic increased), the person said something akin to "What? How? I didn't know you could even do that"

Re: A URL shortener not shortening the URL but makes it look very dodgy

#20
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgive my old-fashioned-ness, but... Why is metered cloud hosting a better choice here than a $5/mo. VPS?

Because credit is free and $5 is not free, I guess.

"£Free" is rarely £0. It usually means "£you do some of the work yourself and we indirectly profit due to metrics/economies of scale/network effects/data/kudos".
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