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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

#111

Post by dpkirchner »

PenguinCoder wrote: post #92
dspillett wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 per…

Premature optimization. Not every single service needs or require 5 nines.

It's true, but I'm woken up more frequently if there are fewer 9s, which is unpleasant. It's worth the extra cost to me.

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

#112

Post by debazel »

arbol wrote: post #101
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…

Personally I've found it faster to build using mongo cause you don't need to worry about schemas. You get 32mb per document and you can work out your downstream processing later, e.g. cleanup and serve to postgres, file, wherever. This data is a big data dump that's feeding ML models so relational stuff is not that important.

I used to build personal projects like this, but after Postgres got JSONB support I haven't found any reason to not just start with Postgres. There's usually a couple of tables/columns you want a proper schema for, and having it all in Postgres to begin with makes it much easier to migrate the schemaless JSONB blobs later on.

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

#113

Post by mystifyingpoi »

hinkley wrote: post #90
arbol wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

+1 this is so true. You've lost, you've already publicly praised yourself that you saved 90%. They won't like the idea of tripling the costs, even if it is still below the previous costs.

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

#114

Post by Eikon »

arbol wrote: post #101
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…

Personally I've found it faster to build using mongo cause you don't need to worry about schemas. You get 32mb per document and you can work out your downstream processing later, e.g. cleanup and serve to postgres, file, wherever. This data is a big data dump that's feeding ML models so relational stuff is not that important.

You definitely do have to worry about a schema. Except it’s ill defined and scattered across your business logic.

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

#115

Post by mathattack »

I experienced some cutthroat commercial behavior from MongoDB. It scared us enough to avoid Atlas, and ultimately move to Cosmos on Azure. Massive savings.

I moved to another employer that was using Atlas, and the bill rivaled AWS. Unfortunately it was too complex to untangle.

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

#117

Post by freefaler »

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.

We have used Hetzner for 15+ years. There were some outages with the nastiest being the network ones. But they're usually not "dramatically bad" if you build with at least basic failover. With this we had seen less than 1 serious per 3 years. Most of the downtime is because of our own stupidity.

If you know what you're doing Hetzner is godsend, they give you hardware and several DCs and it's up to you what you can do. The money difference is massive.

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

#119

Post by navigate8310 »

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 )…

Usually AWS is pretty good at hiding all the reliability and robustness that goes onto into making a customer's managed service. Customers are not made aware what it takes.

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

#120

Post by mads_quist »

MaKey wrote: post #89
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.

You'll have planned downtime just for upgrading MongoDB version or rebooting the instance. I don't think that this is sth you'd want to have. Running MongoDB in a replica set is really easy and much easier than running postgres or MySQL in an HA setup.

No need for SREs. Just add 2 more Hetzner servers.

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