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We cut our Mongo DB costs by 90% by moving to Hetzner

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Re: We cut our Mongo DB costs by 90% by moving to Hetzner

#81

Post by dspillett »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #17

> Here's how we managed to cut our costs by 90% You could cut your MongoDB costs by 100% by not using it ;) > without sacrificing performance or reliability. You're using a single server in a single datacenter. MongoDB Atlas is deployed to VMs on 2-3 AZs. You don't have close to the same reliability. (I'm also curious why their M40 instance costs $1000, when the Pricing Calculator ( https://www.mongodb.com/pricing )…

> You're using a single server in a single datacenter.

This is a common problem with “bare metal saved us $000/mo” articles. Bare metal is cheaper than cloud by any measure, but the comparisons given tend to be misleadingly exaggerated as they don't compare like-for-like in terms of redundancy and support, and after considering those factors it can be a much closer result (sometimes down as far as familiarity and personal preference being more significant).

Of course unless you are paying extra for multi-region redundancy things like the recent us-east-1 outage will kill you, and that single point of failure might not really matter if there are several others throughout your systems anyway, as is sometimes the case.

Re: We cut our Mongo DB costs by 90% by moving to Hetzner

#82

Post by williamdclt »

a13n wrote: post #49
cpursley wrote: post #42

Why in the world do people choose Mongo over Postgres? I'm legit curious. Is it inexperience? Javascript developers who don't know backend or proper data modeling (or about jsonb)? Is this type of decision coming down from non-technical management? Are VCs telling their portfolio companies what to use so they have something to burn their funding on? It's just really confounding, especially when there's even mongo-api…

maybe instead of communicating how dumb you think people are for choosing mongo, communicate why you think it’s so dumb

I've read a lot more about "how dumb it is to use mongo over PG" than the opposite, I think the burden of proof is on the mongo-lovers these days (not that anyone has to prove anything to randos on the internet)

Re: We cut our Mongo DB costs by 90% by moving to Hetzner

#83

Post by darth_avocado »

computerfan494 wrote: post #13
CodesInChaos wrote: post #10

MongoDB Atlas is so overpriced that you can probably save already 90% by moving to AWS.

Most of the cost in their bill wasn't from MongoDB, it was cost passed on from AWS

Highly doubt that. MongoDB has 5000 well paid employees and is not a big loss making enterprise. If most of the cost was pass through to AWS, they’d not be able to do that. Their quarterly revenue is $500M+ but also spend $200M in sales and marketing and $180M in R&D. (All based on their filings)

Re: We cut our Mongo DB costs by 90% by moving to Hetzner

#84

Post by antoniojtorres »

mads_quist wrote: post #57

OK guys, running on a single instance is REALLY a BAD IDEA for non-pet-projects. Really bad! Change it as fast as you can. I love Hetzner for what they offer but you will run into huge outages pretty soon. At least you need two different network zones on Hetzner and three servers. It's not hard to setup, but you need to do it.

agree on single instance, but for hetzner, I run 100+ large bare metal servers in hetzner, have for at least 5 years and there’s only been one significant outage they had, we do spread across all their datacenter zones and replicate, so it’s all been manageable. It’s worth it for us, very worth it.

Re: We cut our Mongo DB costs by 90% by moving to Hetzner

#85

Post by tecleandor »

arbol wrote: post #36
kosherhurricane wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

500GB isn't a lot of data, and $3K/month seems like an extortion for that little data. Having said that, MongoDB pricing page promises 99.995% uptime, which is outstanding, and would probably be hard to beat that doing it oneself, even after adding redundancy. But maybe you don't need that much uptime for your particular use case.

Its more like 700GB now on the new server and we were about to have to migrate to a higher tier on Atlas. > maybe you don't need that much uptime for your particular use case. Correct. Thanks for reading!

Yep, we just migrated to Atlas, and the disk size limitation of the lower instance tiers pushed us to do a round of data cleaning before the migration.

Also, we noticed that after migration, the databases that were occupying ~600GB of disk in our (very old) on premise deployment, were around 1TB big on Atlas. After talking with support for a while we found that they were using Snappy compression with a relatively low compression level and we couldn't change that by ourselves. After requesting it through support, we changed to zstd compression, rebuilt all the storage, and a day or two later our storage was under 500GB.

And backup pricing is super opaque. It doesn't show concrete pricing on the docs, just ranges. And depending on the cloud you deployed, snapshots are priced differently so you can't just multiply you storage by the number of the snapshots, and they aren't transparent about the real size of the snapshots.

All the storage stuff is messy and expensive...

Re: We cut our Mongo DB costs by 90% by moving to Hetzner

#87

Post by chubot »

runako wrote: post #59
goastler wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you're going to have multiple outages us: 0, aws: 1. Looking good so far ;) > AND incur more cross-internet costs hetzner have no bandwidth traffic limit (only speed) on the machine, we can go nuts. I understand you point wrt the cloud, but I spend as much time debugging/building a cloud deployment (atlas :eyes: ) as I do a self-hosted solution. Aws gives you all the tools to build a super reliable data store, but…

> many people just chuck something on us-east-1 and go Even dropping something on a single EC2 node in us-east-1 (or at Google Cloud) is going to be more reliable over time than a single dedicated machine elsewhere. This is because they run with a layer that will e.g. live migrate your running apps in case of hardware failures. The failure modes of dedicated are quite different than those of the modern hyperscaler cl…

It's not an apples-to-apples comparison, because EC2 and Google Cloud have ephemeral disk - persistent disk is an add-on, which is implemented with a complex and frequently changing distributed storage system

On the other hand, a Hetzner machine I just rented came with Linux software RAID enabled (md devices in the kernel)

---

I'm not aware of any comparisons, but I'd like to see see some

It's not straightforward, and it's not obvious the cloud is more reliable

The cloud introduces many other single points of failure, by virtue of being more complex

e.g. human administration failure, with the Unisuper incident

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40366867

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/google-cloud-acciden... - “Unprecedented” Google Cloud event wipes out customer account and its backups

Of course, dedicated hardware could have a similar type of failure, but I think the simplicity means there is less variety in the errors.

e.g. A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable - Leslie Lamport

Re: We cut our Mongo DB costs by 90% by moving to Hetzner

#89

Post by MaKey »

mads_quist wrote: post #57

OK guys, running on a single instance is REALLY a BAD IDEA for non-pet-projects. Really bad! Change it as fast as you can. I love Hetzner for what they offer but you will run into huge outages pretty soon. At least you need two different network zones on Hetzner and three servers. It's not hard to setup, but you need to do it.

I think you're being overly dramatic. In practice I've seen complexity (which HA setups often introduce) causing downtimes far more often than a service being hosted only on a single instance.

Re: We cut our Mongo DB costs by 90% by moving to Hetzner

#90

Post by hinkley »

arbol wrote: post #9
rmoriz wrote: post #3

I‘m a big fan of owning the stack but why not spend the money on redundancy? At least a couple of machines in a different data center at Hetzner or another provider (OVH, Scaleway, Vultr, …) can easily fit your budget.

We will be adding additional db servers and running our own replica set eventually. We're just not there yet. Thanks for reading!

But then you’ll be tripling your costs.

Business people are weird about numbers. You should have claimed 70% even if the replicas do nothing and made them work later on. This is highly likely to bite you on the ass.

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