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Self-Hosting Still Pays

servethehome.com

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Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#131

Post by dheera »

Zelphyr wrote: post #8

I see so often developers state something along the lines of, "We need to go with AWS!" (sometimes substituting AWS with GCP or Azure) and the reason they always give is "scalability". 99% of the time, what they're building not only doesn't need to scale to that degree but they somehow seem to think that it's always inherently cheaper. Meanwhile, when I build something for a client my first go-to is something like Di…

Self hosting being cheaper is obvious. It's just a nightmare to manage reliability. With AWS or any other IaaS provider you're paying to outsource shifts of people around the clock that will work to keep servers and network connections up and running.

Colocation isn't that much better either because there are still situations (like corrupt filesystems or malfunctioning power supplies) that would require physical access to the machine.

With an IaaS provider you're free to go live wherever you want and focus on your business and not need to schedule shifts of people within driving distance of the colocation facility on-call.

Ultimately you're paying to reclaim time, which in almost all cases for startups is a worthwhile trade. Outsource everything that isn't your core business.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#132

Post by yumaikas »

umvi wrote: post #75
Zelphyr wrote: post #8

I see so often developers state something along the lines of, "We need to go with AWS!" (sometimes substituting AWS with GCP or Azure) and the reason they always give is "scalability". 99% of the time, what they're building not only doesn't need to scale to that degree but they somehow seem to think that it's always inherently cheaper. Meanwhile, when I build something for a client my first go-to is something like Di…

Well for me it's more like... why should I pay $5/month for the cheapest DO droplet for a little utility web app that gets less than one hit per day? Seems like a waste to pay for a month of VM time when only a few milliseconds are actually used. I like the idea of FaaS where I'm not being charged when my code isn't running.

I mean, for me, I host a lot of small utilities on my small DO droplet, as well as a few websites that I do want up all the time. One can do more than one thing on a droplet.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#133

Post by [deleted] »

iptrans wrote: post #88

I find it interesting that these comparisons always pit AWS againsta colocation. It would be much more interesting if the comparison was between AWS and dedicated servers. Dedicated servers have all the benefits of colocation, only you don't need to deal with the hardware. The DC takes care of the hardware, all you have to do it administer the server. I find dedicated servers to be very cost effective. You can get of…

[deleted]

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#134

Post by closeparen »

Slartie wrote: post #122
saberience wrote: post #66

So, as someone that works for an enterprise that uses AWS... if we went colocation, how would we replicate: SQS/SNS, DynamoDB, ECS (EC2 and Fargate), Lambda, Kinesis, ECR, ALB, Aurora, S3, Glacier, EMR, EKS, multiple AZs, multiple regions, etc? For us to get the same functionality as all of these services in colocated data centers would be an INSANE amount of work, we'd have to hire so many IT/hardware specialists fo…

If you hadn't tethered your software to proprietary AWS services in the first place, you wouldn't have the problem to "replicate" all of that on your own infrastructure. You would simply "have" that stuff - or better said: you'd have the parts that you actually need (having a giant grab bag of ready-to-use cloud services at your disposal tends to entice developers to use them, regardless of actual need, especially in…

My company has all of these things on-prem, but with teams of at minimum 5 FTEs backing each one. That's the point here: a small shop cannot necessarily afford to fill an oncall roster with Kafka experts or Postgres experts or whatever else is needed.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#135

Post by lta »

outworlder wrote: post #110
shiftpgdn wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. They do not. We run many thousands of instances on AWS. Sure, given our scale, every week we get a couple of instance retirement emails. Usually they are issued many days in advance(sometimes, weeks). Per year, we may get a handful of instances that are suddenly unresponsive. And we don't…

They do

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#136

Post by jayd16 »

tnolet wrote: post #62
nicoburns wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The system I inherited at my current job was built with "scalability" in mind. That meant use of the Firebase databases and splitting everything out into lots of microservices. Ironically this actually caused scaling issues (even with the very small scale we have at the moment) because the lack of query flexibility in the database meant downloading entire collections in order to provide the necessary functionality. W…

Sadly, I’ve seen this at more misguided startups. Microservices solve a problem no startup has until they go series B and grow like bananas. When they actually scale.

Sounds like it has nothing to do with microservices and more that they just blew everything up instead of fixing their firebase schema. But hey, sometimes that's way simpler.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#137

Post by umvi »

welterde wrote: post #103
umvi wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well for me it's more like... why should I pay $5/month for the cheapest DO droplet for a little utility web app that gets less than one hit per day? Seems like a waste to pay for a month of VM time when only a few milliseconds are actually used. I like the idea of FaaS where I'm not being charged when my code isn't running.

Classical web hosting still exists. Probably even has less vendor lock-in and is less likely to bankrupt you if someone posts the small utility web app on HN.

Lambda is $0.20 per 1M requests, + $0.0000000021 per ms of runtime (assuming the "small utility" takes 128 MB RAM or less).

So by my estimates, even if the small utility is #1 on HN for a whole day, it's not going to cost more than a dollar.

Maybe there are more hidden costs, or maybe the small utility uses a lot of runtime though, so you could be right in the right circumstances.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#138

Post by kev009 »

I have my own 1/2 cab, AS number, ARIN allocated IP4 and IP6 space. It costs about $500/mo. It took maybe 100 hours to set up the basics and $6000 for the way I built the hw (which is similar to servethehome's rack). I run everything on FreeBSD. I get to directly talk BGP and get bandwidth at .12c/gbit. Nothing else can come close to this level of low cost, control, learning, and autonomy.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#139

Post by partiallypro »

We used to use an independent host (essentially self hosting) but they went under due to COVID. We moved nearly 1000 customers over to Azure and in the end we are saving money due to simple things like reservations and being cost conscious. We also took over a company that used AWS and they were over spending on their hosting by almost 10-20x what they needed. Not because AWS is inherently expensive but because it was so mismanaged. I don't think self hosting is worth it, when I can freely scale up or down machines in seconds on Azure and my price goes down, we have no fixed costs or maintenance worries. I think it's a fair trade off.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#140

Post by marcinzm »

ProAm wrote: post #124
outworlder wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or have to wait for Amazon to admit degradation of a service is occurring. Please compare apples to apples. If you are comparing to colo, I don't know of any colocation facilities which provide higher level services (say, Kinesis). They might provide some features like CDNs, but nothing very fancy. You are left with a EC2 vs servers racked in some colocation facility comparison. At that point, it's not even fair. I…

There is a lot there, and some of it is apples to apples and some is definitely apples to oranges. I'm just saying overall you have the same number of headaches, they are just different headaches. Just last week there was significant degradation that took quite some time to be admitted (admitted might be the wrong word but everyone seemed to know there was an issue with AWS before AWS said their was an issue) > I don…

>Why would this need to be done if initial implementation was planned and done correctly?

Anyone who thinks they planned everything correctly is just deluding themselves. Admitting you've fucked up, don't know how you fucked up yet but will one day need to fix the fuckup is very important in engineering.

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