Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

rameerez.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 406 posts

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

#151

Post by alphager »

jgb1984 wrote: post #52
tqi wrote: post #35

I'd be more interested to understand (from folk who were there) what the conditions were that made AWS et al such a runaway hit. What did folks gain, and have those conditions meaningfully changed in some way that makes it less of a slam dunk? My recollection from working at a tech company in the early 2010s is that renting rack space and building servers was expensive and time consuming, estimating what the right ha…

You're falling into the false dichotomy that always comes up with these topics: as if the choice is between the cloud and renting rack space while applying your own thermal paste on the CPUs. In reality, for most people, renting dedicated servers is the goldilocks solution (not colocation with your own hardware). You get an incredible amount of power for a very reasonable price, but you don't need to drive to a datac…

> I ordered an extra server today from Hetzner. It was available 90 seconds afterwards.

Back when AWS was starting, this would have taken 1-3 days.

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

#152

Post by jen729w »

selcuka wrote: post #142
fragmede wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get quite far without that box, even, and just use Cloudflare R2 as free static hosting.

CloudFlare Pages is even easier for static hosting with automatic GitHub pulls.

Happy Netlify customer here, same deal. $0.

(LOL 'customer'. But the point is, when the day comes, I'll be happy to give them money.)

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

#154

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

suriya-ganesh wrote: post #38

I've been at too many startups with a devops team that would rather provision 15 machines with 4GB RAM THAN ONE WITH 64GB. I once got into an argument with a lead architect about it and it's really easy to twist the conversation into "don't you think we'll reach that scale?" To justify complexity. The bottom line is for better or worse, the cloud and micro services are keeping a lot of jobs relevant and there's no be…

Multiple small boxes is actually better than one giant box, for a whole lot of reasons. Scaling isn't the issue.

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

#155

Post by ants_everywhere »

kiwijamo wrote: post #105
brendamn wrote: post #26

If you’re going to write a post about why self-hosting is better than cloud*, then it’s probably a good idea to make sure your site loads in under a minute. * at least I assume what this post is; I’m still waiting for it to load.

Loaded instantly for me. :)

sounds like the site isn't able to guarantee reliable service but it works for some people in an unpredictable way

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

#156

Post by busterarm »

koito17 wrote: post #150
busterarm wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

12 TB fits entirely into the RAM of a 2U server (cf. Dell PowerEdge R840). However, I think there's an implicit point in TFA; namely, that your personal and side projects are not scaling to a 12 TB database. With that said, I do manage approximately 14 TB of storage in a RAIDZ2 at my home, for "Linux ISOs". The I/O performance is "good enough" for streaming video and BitTorrent seeding. However, I am not sure what yo…

Still missing the point. This is just one server and just in the dev enviornment?

How many pets do you want to be tending to? I have 10^5 servers I'm responsible for...

The quantity and methods the cloud affords me allow me to operate the same infrastructure with 1/10th as much labor.

At the extreme ends of scale this isn't a benefit, but for large companies in the middle this is the only move that makes any sense.

99% of posts I read talking about how easy and cheap it is to be in the datacenter all have a single digit number of racks worth of stuff. Often far less.

We operate physical datacenters as well. We spend multiple millions in the cloud per month. We just moved another full datacenter into the cloud and the difference in cost between the two is less than $50k/year. Running in physical DCs is really inefficient for us for a long of annoying and insurmountable reasons. And we no longer have to deal with procurement and vendor management. My engineers can focus their energy on more valuable things.

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

#157

Post by thedufer »

arcastroe wrote: post #138
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 co…

> if you reduce latency from one second to a hundred milliseconds, could you celebrate that you've made it 10x faster

Yes you can, because speed has units of inverse time and latency has units of time. So it could be correct to say that cutting latency to 1/10 of its original value is equivalent to making it 10x the original speed - that's how inverses work.

Savings are not, to my knowledge, measured in units of inverse dollars.

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

#158

Post by [deleted] »

busterarm wrote: post #156
koito17 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

12 TB fits entirely into the RAM of a 2U server (cf. Dell PowerEdge R840). However, I think there's an implicit point in TFA; namely, that your personal and side projects are not scaling to a 12 TB database. With that said, I do manage approximately 14 TB of storage in a RAIDZ2 at my home, for "Linux ISOs". The I/O performance is "good enough" for streaming video and BitTorrent seeding. However, I am not sure what yo…

Still missing the point. This is just one server and just in the dev enviornment? How many pets do you want to be tending to? I have 10^5 servers I'm responsible for... The quantity and methods the cloud affords me allow me to operate the same infrastructure with 1/10th as much labor. At the extreme ends of scale this isn't a benefit, but for large companies in the middle this is the only move that makes any sense. 9…

[deleted]

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

#159

Post by pfych »

kelnos wrote: post #37
ranger_danger wrote: post #2

Sorry but my $3 AWS instance is still cheaper than all of those options. If you need a lot of, well, anything, be it compute, memory, storage, bandwidth etc., of course cloud stuff is going to be more expensive... but if you don't need that, then IMO $3/mo on-demand pricing really can't be beat when I don't have to maintain any equipment myself. Oracle also offers perpetually free VM instances if you don't mind the g…

With a quick LLM-assisted search, looks like the cheapest EC2 instance is t4g.micro, which comes in at $2.04/mo. It has 2 vCPUs and and only 512MiB of RAM. (I assume that doesn't include disk; EBS will be extra.) I can certainly see a use for that small amount of compute & RAM, but it's not clear that your level of needs is common. I've been paying for a $16/mo VPS (not on AWS) for about 15 years. It started out at $…

I run heaps of services on AWS and my bill is ~$2-3 - I'm not running any EC2 instances at all. Some of the offerings these cloud providers offer are extremely affordable if you know how to play your cards right and use the right services.

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

#160

Post by abdullahkhalids »

PaulKeeble wrote: post #59

Its not actually that hard to get your own server racked up in a data centre, I have done it. Since it was only one box that I built and installed at home I just shipped it and they racked it in the shared area and plugged the power and network in and gave me the IP address. It was cheaper than renting from someone like hetzner, was about £15 a month at the time for 1A and 5TB a month of traffic at 1gbps. Also had a…

What is the mechanism for such services if you want to replace a component (ex. a failing hard drive or upgrade ram)?
Post reply on HN