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I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

rameerez.com

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Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#131

Post by busterarm »

JCM9 wrote: post #80

This isn’t a binary issue. I disagree with these “abandon the cloud” takes but do agree that most folks spend way way more than they should. The biggest threat to cloud vendors is that everyone wakes up tomorrow and cost optimizes the crap out of their infrastructure. I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to say that global cloud spending could drop by 50% in 3 months if everyone just did a good audit and cleaned up their de…

Exactly this.

We have to use cloud because we're at the low end of 10^5 servers. Once you hit the high end of 10^3 this is really where you need to be.

Everything we're doing is highly inefficient because of decades of fast and loose development by immature software engineers...and having components in the stack that did the same.

If I had 5 years to rewrite and redesign the product to reflect today's computing reality, I could eliminate 90%+ of the cost. But I'll never get that kind of time. Not with 1000 more engineers and 1000 more years and the most willing customers.

You might get lucky enough that you and a bunch of your customers are so fed up with your company that you get to create the competition.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#132

Post by BenjiWiebe »

Aeolun wrote: post #87
winddude wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

linode was better and had cheaper pricing before being bought by akamai

I don’t feel like anything really changed? Fairly certain the prices haven’t changed. It’s honestly been pleasantly stable. I figured I’d have to move after a few months, but we’re a few years into the acquisition and everything still works.

I concur with every word.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#133

Post by bigstrat2003 »

selectively wrote: post #24
anechouapechou wrote: post #19

Fittingly, his website was hugged to death

It's almost like Clouds are really good at scaling and some rented server isn't! Perfect, almost poetic.

It's almost like nobody cares about scaling their blog.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#134

Post by busterarm »

koito17 wrote: post #120
John23832 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't actually need any of those things until you no longer have a "project", but a business which will allow you to pay for the things you require. You'd be amazed by how far you can get with a home linux box and cloudflare tunnels.

On this site, I've seen these kind of takes repeatedly over the past years, so I went ahead and built a little forum that consists of a single Rust binary and SQLite. The binary runs on a Mac Mini in my bedroom with Cloudflare tunnels. I get continuous backups with Litestream, and testing backups is as trivial as running `litestream restore` on my development machine and then running the binary. Despite some pages is…

Just one of the couple dozen databases we run for our product in the dev environment alone is over 12 TB.

How could I not use the cloud?

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#135

Post by n3t »

busterarm wrote: post #134
koito17 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On this site, I've seen these kind of takes repeatedly over the past years, so I went ahead and built a little forum that consists of a single Rust binary and SQLite. The binary runs on a Mac Mini in my bedroom with Cloudflare tunnels. I get continuous backups with Litestream, and testing backups is as trivial as running `litestream restore` on my development machine and then running the binary. Despite some pages is…

Just one of the couple dozen databases we run for our product in the dev environment alone is over 12 TB. How could I not use the cloud?

What's your cloud bill?

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#136

Post by rameerez »

ascorbic wrote: post #29

Cheap shot maybe, but the fact that the page takes 10 seconds to load when it hits the HN front page is a great, inadvertant illustration of why you might want to use the cloud sometimes.

OP here. As others have said, it loads immediately for me (tested on desktop + on mobile data + incognito)

The entire site is cached + Cloudflare sits on top of everything. I just ran a couple performance tests under the current HN traffic (~120 concurrent visitors) and everything looks good, all loads under 1 second. The server is quite happy at an average load of 0.06 right now, not even close to start breaking a sweat.

Turns out you can get off the cloud and hit the frontpage of HN and your site will be alright.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#137

Post by EGreg »

Sebb767 wrote: post #16

I 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 f…

I started out with linode, a decade ago.

It became much more expensive than AWS, because it bundled the hard drive space with the RAM. Couldn't scale one without scaling the other. It was ridiculous.

AWS has a bunch of startup credits you can use, if you're smart.

But if you want free hosting, nothing beats just CloudFlare. They are literally free and even let you sign up anonymously with any email. They don't even require a credit card, unlike the other ones. You can use cloudflare workers and have a blazing fast site, web services, and they'll even take care of shooing away bots for you. If you prefer to host something on your own computer, well then use their cache and set up a cloudflare tunnel. I've done this for Telegram bots for example.

Anything else - just use APIs. Need inference? Get a bunch of Google credits, and load your stuff into Vertex or whatever. Want to take payments anonymously from around the world? Deploy a dapp. Pay nothing. Literally nothing!

LEVEL 2:

And if you want to get extra fancy, have people open their browser tabs and run your javascript software in there, earning your cryptocurrency. Now you've got access to tons of people willing to store chunks of files for you, run GPU inference, whatever.

Oh do you want to do distributed inference? Wasmcloud: https://wasmcloud.com/blog/2025-01-15-running-distributed-ml... ... but I'd recommend just paying Google for AI workloads

Want livestreaming that's peer to peer? We've got that too: https://github.com/Qbix/Media/blob/main/web/js/WebRTC.js

PS: For webrtc livestreaming, you can't get around having to pay for TURN servers, though.

LEVEL 3:

Want to have unstoppable decentralized apps that can even run servers? Then use pears (previously dat / hypercore). If you change your mindset, from server-based to peer to peer apps, then you can run hypercore in the browser, and optionally have people download it and run servers.

https://pears.com/news/building-apocalypse-proof-application...

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#138

Post by arcastroe »

jaredhallen wrote: post #45

I'm fully aware this is pedantic, but you can't save 10x. You can pay 1/10. You can save 90%. Your previous costs could have been 10x your current costs. But 10x is more by definition, not less. You can't save it.

hmm.. if you reduce latency from one second to a hundred milliseconds, could you celebrate that you've made it 10x faster, or would you have the same quibble there too?

Edit: Thinking about this some more: You could say you are saving 9x [of the new cost], and it would be a correct statement. I believe the error is assuming the reference frame is the previous cost vs the new cost, but since it is not specified, it could be either.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#139

Post by wheybags »

busterarm wrote: post #134
koito17 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On this site, I've seen these kind of takes repeatedly over the past years, so I went ahead and built a little forum that consists of a single Rust binary and SQLite. The binary runs on a Mac Mini in my bedroom with Cloudflare tunnels. I get continuous backups with Litestream, and testing backups is as trivial as running `litestream restore` on my development machine and then running the binary. Despite some pages is…

Just one of the couple dozen databases we run for our product in the dev environment alone is over 12 TB. How could I not use the cloud?

https://www.seagate.com/products/enterprise-drives/exos/exos...

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#140

Post by sholladay »

I think the main thing holding people back from leaving the cloud is simple inertia. There was a time when the cloud was obviously the right choice. Static IPv4 addresses were becoming scarce, IPv6 had not been deployed widely enough, and cloud providers made it easy to stand up a server and some storage with high speed links on the cheap. But over time, things have changed. Rate limits, data caps, and egress fees are now normal (and costly). IPv6 is now deployed widely enough that you might be willing to just run an IPv6-only stack, which greatly simplifies running a server on-premise. And of course, we've all seen time and again how providers will carelessly lock out your cloud account for arbitrary reasons with little to no recourse. The time has come to own your infrastructure again. But that won't happen until people realize it's easy to do.
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