Vercel is my favorite.. They charge you to pay for AWS.
I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars
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Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars
#12The first couple of paragraphs of price comparisons are useful. Then there are many paragraphs of sheer waffle. The author doesn't even seem able to define what "the cloud" is: > The whole debate of “is this still the cloud or not” is nonsense to me. You’re just getting lost in naming conventions. VPS, bare metal, on-prem, colo, who cares what you call it. You need to put your servers somewhere. Sure, have a computer…
The cheap hosting service they switched to is arguably "cloud".
If you can't drive to the location where your stuff is running, and then enter the building blindfolded, yet put your hands on the correct machine, then it's cloud.
Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars
#13yet another obsessive take on "cloud is bad and expensive" eh? I think they vastly forget the value of some SaaS offerings in terms of time saving for small companies. running and managing numerous DBs, k8s clusters, ci/cd pipelines and stateless container systems is simply impossible with a team of 1-2 people. sure if the setup is simple and only requires a few classic components, this is way cheaper and for a 99.9%…
Not agreeing/disagreeing with your core point, but this doesn't seem right:
> running and managing numerous DBs, k8s clusters, ci/cd pipelines and stateless container systems is simply impossible with a team of 1-2 people.
That's a medium to large homelab worth of stuff, which means it can be run by a single nerd in their spare time.
Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars
#14I have a VPS. It costs me £1.34 per month. It's way over-powered for what I need it for.
However, one situation where I think the cloud might be useful is for archive storage. I did a comparison between AWS Glacier Deep Storage and local many-hard-drive boxes, for storing PB-scale backups, and AWS just squeaked in as slightly cheaper, but only because you only pay for the amount you use, whereas if you buy a box then you have to pay for the unused space. And it's off-site, which is a resilience advantage. And the defrosting/downloading charge was acceptable at effectively 2.5 months worth of storage. However, at smaller scales you would probably win with a small NAS, and at larger scales you'd be able to set up a tape library and fairly comprehensively beat AWS for price.
Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars
#15Idiotic piece - the purpose of 'the cloud' is to scale large demand applications. Rental hardware can't really do that.
The post is about that 99% of companies that will never go large scale. Its point is that they don't need cloud, buying a server or two is all they need.
Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars
#16I dislike those black and white takes a lot. It's absolutely true that most startups that just run an EC2 instance will save a lot of cash going to Hetzner, Linode, Digital Ocean or whatever. I do host at Hetzner myself and so do a lot of my clients.
That being said, the cloud does have a lot of advantages:
- You're getting a lot of services readily available. Need offsite backups? A few clicks. Managed database? A few clicks. Multiple AZs? Available in seconds.
- You're not paying up-front costs (vs. investing hundreds of dollars for buying server hardware) and everything is available right now [0]
- Peak-heavy loads can be a lot cheaper. Mostly irrelevant for you average compute load, but things are quite different if you need to train an LLM
- Many services are already certified according to all kinds of standards, which can be very useful depending on your customers
Also, engineering time and time in general can be expensive. If you are a solo entrepreneur or a slow growth company, you have a lot of engineering time for basically free. But in a quick growth or prototyping phase, not to speak of venture funding, things can be quite different. Buying engineering time for >150€/hour can quickly offset a lot of saving [1].
Does this apply to most companies? No. Obviously not. But the cloud is not too expensive - you're paying for stuff you don't need. That's an entirely different kind of error.
[0] Compared to the rack hosting setup described in the post. Hetzner, Linode, etc. do provide multiple AZs with dedicated servers.
[1] Just to be fair, debugging cloud errors can be time consuming, too, and experienced AWS engineers will not be cheaper. But an RDS instance with solid backups-equivalent will usually not amortize quickly, if you need to pay someone to set it up.
Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars
#17I have a VPS. It costs me £1.34 per month. It's way over-powered for what I need it for. However, one situation where I think the cloud might be useful is for archive storage. I did a comparison between AWS Glacier Deep Storage and local many-hard-drive boxes, for storing PB-scale backups, and AWS just squeaked in as slightly cheaper, but only because you only pay for the amount you use, whereas if you buy a box then…
Yeah, but in 800 months you'd come out ahead with a dedicated server in your closet.
Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars
#18"I FINALLY got everything off the cloud"
...
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"P.S. follow me on Twitter"
So uh, not everything
Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars
#19Fittingly, his website was hugged to death
Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars
#20Jeez, this was a painful read. I actually stopped after a few paragraphs and asked AI to make it more technically focused and remove the ranting so I could stomach it.
Strawman arguments, ad hominem attacks and Spongebob mocking memes, and the casual venturing into conspiracy theories and malicious intentions...
> Why do all these people care if I save more money or not? ... If they’re wrong, and if I and more people like me manage to convince enough people that they’re wrong, they may be out of a job soon.
I have a feeling AWS is doing fine without him. Cloud is one of the fastest growing areas in tech because their product solves a need for certain people. There is no larger conspiracy to keep cloud in business by silencing dissent on Twitter.
> You will hear a bunch of crap from people that have literally never tried the alternative. People with no real hands-on experience managing servers for their own projects for any sustained period of time.
This is more of a rant than a thoughtful technical article. I don't know what I was expecting, because I clicked on the title knowing it was clickbait, so shame on me, I guess...
Is this what I'm missing by not having Twitter?