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

Why Some Startups Say the Cloud Is a Waste of Money

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–58 of 58 posts

Re: Why Some Startups Say the Cloud Is a Waste of Money

#51

Post by nissimk »

mtkd wrote: post #44

There are a lot of hidden costs to the inflexibility of running local hardware. With hosted you get: - 24h availability of mixed skills sets (e.g. Cisco at 4am) - ability to expand if under load/attack - costs in proportion to revenue (sales go down you can have lower opex next month) - ability to move resource around the globe in days Some of this becomes critical if you get to point that SLAs matter.

I don't think anybody is recommending small companies host their own hardware, just that they own their own hardware. Renting a full cabinet at a premier datacenter costs under 2k / month and bandwidth there is far less than bandwidth cost from AWS.

Re: Why Some Startups Say the Cloud Is a Waste of Money

#52

Post by 7Figures2Commas »

jared314 wrote: post #39
7Figures2Commas wrote: post #31

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/wp-content/uploads/2013... I guess "casual dress code" at startups these days means exposed feet on the table, right where your co-workers can see (and perhaps smell) them. And why does he have a roll of toilet paper under his monitor?

> And why does he have a roll of toilet paper under his monitor? For use as facial tissues.

At the risk of sounding facetious, there's an app for that: facial tissues.

Having a roll of toilet paper on your desk is incredibly tacky.

Re: Why Some Startups Say the Cloud Is a Waste of Money

#53

Post by reverius42 »

7Figures2Commas wrote: post #52
jared314 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And why does he have a roll of toilet paper under his monitor? For use as facial tissues.

At the risk of sounding facetious, there's an app for that: facial tissues. Having a roll of toilet paper on your desk is incredibly tacky.

While we're criticizing this guy, he also has his headphones on backwards. I don't know how anyone could listen to music like that.

Re: Why Some Startups Say the Cloud Is a Waste of Money

#54

Post by greendata »

dorfsmay wrote: post #38

The right tool for the right workload... If you only need five servers on the net, VPS' make sense (cheap, easy to spin new ones, etc...). If you need 10, physicals (aka dedicated), might make sense. They're cheaper per Ghz, but take longer and need more skills to bring online. Nees more? Colo might make sense. Also, as you expand to physicals and colo, using some of the other options for specific needs might make se…

This is the correct path. Also, something like Heroku or google app engine can be a first step if you have only one developer for front/backend/"dev ops". I prefer a VPS like like Linode as a first step but there is some specialized knowledge involved in setting up and maintaining a VPS correctly.

For the business person:

- Heroku first (if your dev hasn't setup a VPS, dedicated server before)

- Once something like Heroku starts costing you more than $500 a month, it's time to pay to move it to a VPS like Linode or digital ocean (new than Linode but cheaper). You can start out with just a server for the app and one for the DB

Re: Why Some Startups Say the Cloud Is a Waste of Money

#55

Post by beachstartup »

bsenftner wrote: post #30
beachstartup wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well, it's actually a very easy thing to quantify, but the cost/benefit analysis is different for every kind of company and computing requirement - the REAL problem is it takes experience in running your own datacenter or at least colocated hardware to perform this analysis, and almost nobody does this because they all work for large internal IT orgs or the cloud providers themselves.

You'd be surprized how fast that experience is gained. Try putting a server in colo and you'll be surprised. There is nothing to it. NOTHING. Don't buy the hype. Try it and see for yourself.

1 or 2 is easy, but that's the sweet spot for cloud services.

a half cabinet + sufficient power and smart power distribution + real networking + remote hardware level access + backup is where it starts to get complicated, but profitable.

Re: Why Some Startups Say the Cloud Is a Waste of Money

#56

Post by ksec »

Cloud is Expensive. It is a simple Fact. The future is more about Hybrid, I dont mean Colo. More like OVH. Where you can have you baseline using Dedicated Servers and use Public Cloud to Scale up and Down during peaks.

That is why i have been asking why all these Cloud Providers dont offer dedicated machines.

Re: Why Some Startups Say the Cloud Is a Waste of Money

#57

Post by nasalgoat »

csears wrote: post #17
bluedino wrote: post #14

>> That’s $324,000 a year. But for just $120,000, the company could buy all the physical servers it needed for the job What about power, cooling, rent in the building for the room you're keeping them in, backup generator, internet connectivity, administration costs (setup, repairs, installation), etc? >> “The public cloud is phenomenal if you really need its elasticity,” Frenkiel says. “But if you don’t — if you do a…

There's also the an opportunity cost to consider if your actual demand turns out to be higher than projected and you're not able to scale up to meet it. I think we'll see more companies using a hybrid model where you can run your steady-state workload level on dedicated gear but with the ability burst into a cloud to handle peaks and flash demand.

My experience with cloud overflow configurations is that it never works as nicely as you expect, due to a lot of the drawbacks of cloud infrastructure such as variable performance and latency issues.

Re: Why Some Startups Say the Cloud Is a Waste of Money

#58

Post by nasalgoat »

mtkd wrote: post #44

There are a lot of hidden costs to the inflexibility of running local hardware. With hosted you get: - 24h availability of mixed skills sets (e.g. Cisco at 4am) - ability to expand if under load/attack - costs in proportion to revenue (sales go down you can have lower opex next month) - ability to move resource around the globe in days Some of this becomes critical if you get to point that SLAs matter.

The only time that EC2 pricing becomes close to physical equipment is with reserved instances, and in that case, you lose money if you spin those down.

If you want to maintain that flexibility, you can't use reserved and therefore your costs rise proportionally.

Post reply on HN