Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AWS is 10x slower than a dedicated server for the same price [video]

youtube.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 168 posts

Re: AWS is 10x slower than a dedicated server for the same price [video]

#91

Post by benterix »

paranoidrobot wrote: post #36

I'm struggling to find a way to express my opinion about this video without seeming like a complete ass. If the author's point was to make a low effort "ha ha AWS sucks" video, well sure: success, I guess. Nobody outside of AWS sales is going to say AWS is cheaper. But comparing the lowest end instances, and apparently, using ECS without seeming to understand how they're configuring or using it just makes their point…

For an older but more to the point comparison, see this: https://jan.rychter.com/enblog/cloud-server-cpu-performance-...

Re: AWS is 10x slower than a dedicated server for the same price [video]

#92

Post by enronmusk »

Although the video is correct in the sense that AWS is vastly overpriced compared to most other cloud/VPS providers, the title is wrong: OP is not using a dedicated server (see 2:40 of the video) -- he is using a shared VPS. Hetzner sell proper dedicated servers, whether bare metal or virtualized.

I believe their bare metal servers should have even better price/perf ratio, but I don't have data to back that up.

Re: AWS is 10x slower than a dedicated server for the same price [video]

#93

Post by isoprophlex »

aurareturn wrote: post #34
oersted wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a CTO of a number of small startups, I am still struggling to understand what exactly AWS and other cloud providers give you to justify the markup. And yes we’ve been heavy users of both AWS and Google Cloud for years, mainly because of the credits they initially provided, but also used VMs, dedicated servers and other services from Hetzner and OVH extensively. In my experience, in terms of availability and securi…

When your cheap dedicated server goes down and your admin is on holiday and you have hundreds of angry customers calling you, you'll get it. Or you need to restore your Postgres database and you find out that the backups didn't work. And finally you have a brilliant idea of hiring a second $150k/year dev ops admin so that at least one is always working and they can check each other's work. Suddenly, you're spending $…

When your AWS bill suddenly spikes to $69k because some data science intern left a huge gpu backed EC2 instance running in ap-southeast-2 with a misconfigured auto-scaling group, and your CTO is at a "digital transformation" conference, and you have hundreds of angry investors asking why your burn rate tripled, you’ll get it.

Or you need to debug why your Lambda function is throttling and you find out that the CloudWatch logs were never properly configured and you’ve been flying blind for three months.

And finally you have a brilliant idea of hiring a second $150k/year AWS solutions architect so that at least one person can actually understand the bill and they can check each other’s Terraform configs. Suddenly, you’re spending $300k on two cloud wizards alone and the cost savings of "not managing your own infrastructure" are completely gone.

The snide rebuttal basically writes itself.

Re: AWS is 10x slower than a dedicated server for the same price [video]

#94

Post by graemep »

mgaunard wrote: post #70
tempestn wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you own your own hardware, but you can provision a leased dedicated server from many different providers in an hour or three, and still pay far less than for comparable hardware from AWS.

That sounds like a good deal, what providers offer this?

OVH, Hetzner, Scaleway. Lots of smaller providers. Most people who offer dedicated servers do this.

Re: AWS is 10x slower than a dedicated server for the same price [video]

#95

Post by [deleted] »

n4r9 wrote: post #79
grey-area wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is statistically far more likely that your cloud service will go down for hours or days, and you will have no recourse and will just have to wait till AWS manage to resolve it.

I suspect that this is really about liability. When AWS goes down you can just throw up your hands, everyone's in the same boat. If your own server goes down you worry that your customers doubt your competence. It's actually kinda frustrating - as an industry we're accepting worse outcomes due to misperceptions. That's how the free market goes sometimes.

[deleted]

Re: AWS is 10x slower than a dedicated server for the same price [video]

#96

Post by adamcharnock »

h_ko wrote: post #80
adamcharnock wrote: post #57

This is exactly true, and is something we have built our business around. In fact, I just kicked-off a multi-TiB Postgres migration for one of our clients this morning. We're moving them out of Supabase and onto a bare-metal multi-AZ Postgresql cluster in Hetzner. I'm going to say what I always say here - for so many SME's the hyperscaler cloud provider has been the safe default choice. But as time goes on a few thin…

Just curious: Did you move to self-hosted Supabase? Or migrated to the underlying OSS equivalents for each feature/service? I find Supabase immensely helpful to minimize overhead in the beginning, but would love to better understand where it starts breaking and how hard an eventual migration would be.

In this particular case the only need was for Postgres migration, no other services needed.

The problems we've seen or heard about with Supabase are:

* Cost (in either magnitude or variability). Either from usage, or having to go onto their Enterprise-tier pricing for one reason or another * The usual intractable cloud-oddities – dropped connections, performance speed-bumps * Increased network latency (just the way it goes when data has to cross a network fabric. Its fast, but not as fast as your own private network) * Scaling events tend not to be as smooth as one would hope

None of these are unique to Supabase though, they can simply all arise naturally from building infrastructure on a cloud platform.

Regarding self-hosted Supabase - we're certainly open to deploying this for our clients, we've been experimenting with it internally. Happy to chat with you or anyone who's interested. Email is adam@ company domain.

Re: AWS is 10x slower than a dedicated server for the same price [video]

#97

Post by theshrike79 »

grey-area wrote: post #44
aurareturn wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When your cheap dedicated server goes down and your admin is on holiday and you have hundreds of angry customers calling you, you'll get it. Or you need to restore your Postgres database and you find out that the backups didn't work. And finally you have a brilliant idea of hiring a second $150k/year dev ops admin so that at least one is always working and they can check each other's work. Suddenly, you're spending $…

It is statistically far more likely that your cloud service will go down for hours or days, and you will have no recourse and will just have to wait till AWS manage to resolve it.

When us-east-1 goes down, half the internet goes down with it.

Customers call and complain about downtime, I can just vaguely point at everything being on fire from Facebook to Instagram to online banking sites.

They get it.

When the self-hosted server fries itself, I'm on the hook for fixing it ASAP.

Re: AWS is 10x slower than a dedicated server for the same price [video]

#99

Post by oersted »

mgaunard wrote: post #32
oersted wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a CTO of a number of small startups, I am still struggling to understand what exactly AWS and other cloud providers give you to justify the markup. And yes we’ve been heavy users of both AWS and Google Cloud for years, mainly because of the credits they initially provided, but also used VMs, dedicated servers and other services from Hetzner and OVH extensively. In my experience, in terms of availability and securi…

What AWS gives you is the ability to spin up dozens if not thousands of hosts in a single click. If you run your own hardware, getting stuff shipped to a datacenter and installed is 2 to 4 weeks (and potentially much longer based on how efficient your pipeline is)

What really needs thousands of hosts nowadays? Even if you have millions of users. Computers are plenty fast now and leveraging that is not any harder if you choose the right stack.

And even if you are building with microservices, most standard servers can handle dozens in a single machine at once. They are all mostly doing network calls with minimal compute. Even better actually if they are in the same host and the network doesn’t get involved.

If you want to, there are simple tools to hook a handful of them as a cluster and/or instantly spawn extra slightly costlier VMs in case of failure or a spike in usage, if a short outage is really a world-ending event, which it isn’t for almost every software system or business. These capabilities have not been exclusive to the major cloud providers for years.

Of course we are generalizing a lot by this point, I’d be happy to discuss specific cases.

Re: AWS is 10x slower than a dedicated server for the same price [video]

#100

Post by dwedge »

spwa4 wrote: post #22

Didn't even mention the difference in data costs, or S3 plus transfer, because then we'll be going into 2-orders-of-magnitude differences ... Not to mention what happens when you pay per megabyte and someone ddos-es you. Cloud brought back almost all hosting antipatterns, and means denial-of-service attacks really should be renamed denial-of-wallet attacks. And leaving a single S3 bucket, a single Serverless function…

Or the difference in effort predicting those costs
Post reply on HN