As much as I love Hetzner, the article is misleading. Using a single server today makes no sense whatsoever unless it's for hobby projects. It will fail. My servers at Hetzner routinely fail every few years (4-5 maybe), usually it's a hard drive, but sometimes motherboard or PSU. If it's a drive, you need to take it offline to rebuild the array, it can take a few hours. Like honestly, this article blew up my mind. I'd never use such setup in production. Just add the damn second server (or two), it's dirt cheap!
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
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
> MongoDB Atlas is deployed to VMs on 2-3 AZs I've not actually seen an AZ go down in isolation, so whilst I agree its technically a less "robust" deployment, in practice its not that much of a difference. > these "we cut bare costs by moving away from the cloud" posts are catnip for HN. But they usually don't make sense. We moved away from atlas because they couldn’t cope with the data growth that we had(4tb is the…
> I've not actually seen an AZ go down in isolation Counterpoint: I have. Maybe not completely down, but degraded, or out of capacity on an instance type, or some other silly issue that caused an AZ drain. It happens.
While I agree, I remember we once had cross-region replication for some product but when AWS was down the service was down anyway because of some dependency. Things were working fine during our DR exercises, but when the actual failure arrived, cross-region turned out useless.
Re: We cut our Mongo DB costs by 90% by moving to Hetzner
#143> 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 )…
> 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…
> unless you are paying extra for multi-region redundancy things like the recent us-east-1 outage will kill you
Unfortunately it's not guaranteed hat paying for multi-region replication will save you.
Re: We cut our Mongo DB costs by 90% by moving to Hetzner
#144You could cut it even more by moving to on-prem instead. Personally I’d rather have it in AWS so that I’m not responsible for keeping it working 24/7.
Re: We cut our Mongo DB costs by 90% by moving to Hetzner
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
Highly doubt that. MongoDB has 5000 well paid employees and is not a big loss making enterprise. If most of the cost was pass through to AWS, they’d not be able to do that. Their quarterly revenue is $500M+ but also spend $200M in sales and marketing and $180M in R&D. (All based on their filings)
You can look at this particular bill and observe that more than 50% of the cost was going to AWS.
If they’re a reseller of AWS, which they will be, they decide the rates that get charged.
Re: We cut our Mongo DB costs by 90% by moving to Hetzner
#146Earlier 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.
you have to look at all the factors, a simple server in a simple datacenter can be very very stable. When we were all doing bare metal servers back in the day server uptimes measured in years wasn't that rare.
Re: We cut our Mongo DB costs by 90% by moving to Hetzner
#147> 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.
An interesting experiment would be doing the equivalent at the scale of the median saas company.
Setup mongodb (or any database) so that you have geographically distributed nodes with replication+whatever else and maintain the same SLA as one of the big hyperscalers. Blog about how long did it take to setup, how hard is it to maintain, and how much are the ongoing costs.
My hunch is a setup on the scale of the median saas company is way more simple and cost effective than you'd think.
Re: We cut our Mongo DB costs by 90% by moving to Hetzner
#148Why 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…
> Why in the world do people choose Mongo over Postgres?
I'm using on a project not by choice. It was chosen already when I joined the project and the more we develop the project the more I feel Postgres would be a better fit but I don't think we can change it now
Re: We cut our Mongo DB costs by 90% by moving to Hetzner
#149> 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 )…
AWS and Azure were down for a full day in the past month. No way I cannot spin up my infra in a full day even if the current datacenter burns to the ground. So we have the same reliability.
Not if you don’t have hot replicated user data etc, assuming that matters, which it will unless you outsource auth and if you do that you’re back at square 1
Re: We cut our Mongo DB costs by 90% by moving to Hetzner
#150Can somebody explain to me how you would retain vector indexes in this migration to Hetzner? We recently began using Atlas Cloud and I’m concerned about these rising costs — but my understanding was that, if you self-host, you lose the ability to create vector indexes.