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

Self-Hosting Still Pays

servethehome.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 343 posts

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#11

Post by 02020202 »

munk-a wrote: post #3

Wait - this article appears to compare hardware costs of self-hosting against the total cost of using AWS. It's missing the most expensive component (labour) which just so happens to be extremely expensive to scale.

that it the most used argument these days...but it's bs. if i use bare metal, the purchase is equivalent of 2-3 months of cloud pricing and the rest 9-10 months can be spent on admin/tech...the catch is that if you start scaling this up(ie. you get 10 powerful servers), bare metal becomes cheaper by thousands of percent yoy. the compounded savings are through the roof. cloud just has better PR, that's all.

cloud is great for development, tinkering and figuring out the scale. after that, bare metal is king. and with docker, ansible/salt, nomad... there is zero need for over-engineered and over-complicated and over-paid cloud crap that sales people force down your throat day after day.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#12

Post by TomBombadildoze »

shiftpgdn wrote: post #5
munk-a wrote: post #3

Wait - this article appears to compare hardware costs of self-hosting against the total cost of using AWS. It's missing the most expensive component (labour) which just so happens to be extremely expensive to scale.

AWS doesn't manage itself. You still need someone to control your AWS instances.

Of course. However, you don't need someone to provision and monitor power, connectivity, datacenter security, and all the responsibilities AWS absolutely prices in for you. You also substantially reduce your effort and cost toward capacity planning and managing depreciation. You pay for consumption of _all the things_ required to operate compute infrastructure, plus their margin.

There are certainly companies and problems for which colocating still makes more sense than the cloud but 9 out of 10 of these articles completely gloss over most of the costs. This article is one of them.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#13

Post by riku_iki »

Rantenki wrote: post #10

TIL: AWS is only expensive if your time has no value. Article neglected to add the cost of labour for setup (edit: aside of racking), maintenance (security updates on infrastructure, etc), and disaster response. It also missed the cost of downtime based on projected MTTR for a failure. The word "fail" only appears once in the page, and not in regards to recovery, only preventative replacement. It's absolutely true th…

It also depends on how computationally intensive your application is, AWS premium can be higher than labor cost if you need large scale data crunching.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#14

Post by Rantenki »

shiftpgdn wrote: post #5
munk-a wrote: post #3

Wait - this article appears to compare hardware costs of self-hosting against the total cost of using AWS. It's missing the most expensive component (labour) which just so happens to be extremely expensive to scale.

AWS doesn't manage itself. You still need someone to control your AWS instances.

That's false equivalence. If your instance dies, you don't need to drive over to the colo, plug into a KVM, diagnose, and then pull and re-rack a new server. They do all that stuff, and it's worth the $$$.

Also, you'll never get into a situation on AWS where you have a 3 day lead-time for a replacement GBIC, or NVMe drive, or seomthing, while your customers scream and bail out for a competitor that isn't down.

Yes, you need to manage the infrastructure, but now it's a software configuration task instead of a physical maintenance one.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#15

Post by shiftpgdn »

Rantenki wrote: post #10

TIL: AWS is only expensive if your time has no value. Article neglected to add the cost of labour for setup (edit: aside of racking), maintenance (security updates on infrastructure, etc), and disaster response. It also missed the cost of downtime based on projected MTTR for a failure. The word "fail" only appears once in the page, and not in regards to recovery, only preventative replacement. It's absolutely true th…

Do you actually use AWS or are you just parroting something you've read? Do you understand that with AWS you still have to setup instances, manage security updates, permission and deal with disaster response (US-East-1 outage?) If you've run anything at any scale for any length of time you'll know that EC2 hosts frequently get rebooted with short notice.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#16

Post by z92 »

Rantenki wrote: post #10

TIL: AWS is only expensive if your time has no value. Article neglected to add the cost of labour for setup (edit: aside of racking), maintenance (security updates on infrastructure, etc), and disaster response. It also missed the cost of downtime based on projected MTTR for a failure. The word "fail" only appears once in the page, and not in regards to recovery, only preventative replacement. It's absolutely true th…

He did,

Quote :

We are going to say we used four hours of labor. This includes drive time to the primary data center. Since it is far away (18-20 minute drive), we actually did not go there for several quarters. So over 32 months, we had budgeted $640 for remote hands. We effectively either paid $160/ hr or paid less than that even rounding up to four hours.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#18

Post by riku_iki »

TomBombadildoze wrote: post #12
shiftpgdn wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS doesn't manage itself. You still need someone to control your AWS instances.

Of course. However, you don't need someone to provision and monitor power, connectivity, datacenter security, and all the responsibilities AWS absolutely prices in for you. You also substantially reduce your effort and cost toward capacity planning and managing depreciation. You pay for consumption of _all the things_ required to operate compute infrastructure, plus their margin. There are certainly companies and pro…

> you don't need someone to provision and monitor power, connectivity, datacenter security

this is all included into colocation service?

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#19

Post by Rantenki »

riku_iki wrote: post #13
Rantenki wrote: post #10

TIL: AWS is only expensive if your time has no value. Article neglected to add the cost of labour for setup (edit: aside of racking), maintenance (security updates on infrastructure, etc), and disaster response. It also missed the cost of downtime based on projected MTTR for a failure. The word "fail" only appears once in the page, and not in regards to recovery, only preventative replacement. It's absolutely true th…

It also depends on how computationally intensive your application is, AWS premium can be higher than labor cost if you need large scale data crunching.

That's definitely true. It still makes sense to run your own AI/ML servers on-prem if you're saturating some $20k/each GPU boxes, for example.

But ... most web applications are still IO bound, and labour is surprisingly expensive.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#20

Post by KingMachiavelli »

shiftpgdn wrote: post #4

You don't even need to buy a new EPYC or Xeon Scalable system. A 20 core Xeon v3/v4 system with 128gb of ram can be had off lease for $1000. Psychz.net provides 1u colocation with 1/Gbs link (10/Gbs burst) for $80/mo. Equivalent EC2 is $300-600/month with no better reliability. Plus you have to deal with noisy neighbors and bandwidth overages. Build your baseline usage in colo and burst into AWS unless you like buyin…

> No better reliability?

Pretty sure EC2 instances and EBS volumes have a lot more redundency than a single server. You really need two colocated servers to replace a single EC2 instance. Still probably cheaper but also a larger time investment.

If the difference between AWS vs colocation is an additional FTE then AWS is cheaper.

Post reply on HN