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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

#151
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The sad part of that is that 3 Hetzner servers are still less than 20% of the price of equivalent AWS resources. This was already pretty bad when AWS started, but now it's reaching truly ridiculous proportions.

from the "Serverborse": i7-7700 with 64GB ram and 500G disk.

37.5 euros/month

This is ~8 vcpus + 64GB ram + 512G disk.

585 USD/month

It gets a lot worse if you include any non-negligible internet traffic. How many machines before for your company a team of SREs is worth it? I think it's actually dropped to 100.

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

#152

> 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 )…

> For example, during the AWS outage, my company was in us-east-1, and we never had any issues, because we didn't depend on calling AWS APIs to continue operating. Things already running continue to run.

Naïve. If the network infrastructure is down, your computer goes down, it just happens that the functionality that went down you didn’t rely on. You could not rely on any functions at all by turning the server off, too.

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

#153
I feel like we see stories like this more and more. Makes you wonder just how durable the revenue of cloud providers are when self hosting on VMs has never been easier and more cost effective.

Then again, nextjs + vercel + gihtub are awfully convenient.

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

#154

I feel like we see stories like this more and more. Makes you wonder just how durable the revenue of cloud providers are when self hosting on VMs has never been easier and more cost effective. Then again, nextjs + vercel + gihtub are awfully convenient.

Self hosting requires a different skill set - full blown sysadmin / SRE vs. “The application starts, just deploy it and the PaaS takes care of load balancing, scaling, healing, observability etc”.

I’m not defending cloud-esque paas here (I would totally prefer to manage VMs directly) but it should be recognized that it gives some value depending on what you’re comfortable doing with infrastructure.

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

#155
post #73

> 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 )…

> Intelligent, robust design at one provider (like AWS) is way more resilient, and intra-zone transfer is cheaper than going out to the cloud ($0.02/GB vs $0.08/GB). If traffic cost is relevant (which it is for a lot of use cases), Hetzner's price of $1.20/TB ($0.0012 / GB) for internet traffic [1] is an order of magnitude less than what AWS charges between AWS locations in the same metro. If you host only at provide…

keep in mind, for dedicated servers, traffic is free and unlimited - see the page you've linked

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

#156
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you're going to have multiple outages us: 0, aws: 1. Looking good so far ;) > AND incur more cross-internet costs hetzner have no bandwidth traffic limit (only speed) on the machine, we can go nuts. I understand you point wrt the cloud, but I spend as much time debugging/building a cloud deployment (atlas :eyes: ) as I do a self-hosted solution. Aws gives you all the tools to build a super reliable data store, but…

> many people just chuck something on us-east-1 and go Even dropping something on a single EC2 node in us-east-1 (or at Google Cloud) is going to be more reliable over time than a single dedicated machine elsewhere. This is because they run with a layer that will e.g. live migrate your running apps in case of hardware failures. The failure modes of dedicated are quite different than those of the modern hyperscaler cl…

Hardware failures on server hardware at the scale of 1 machine are far less common than us-east-1 downtime

The typical failure mode of AWS is much better. Half the internet is down, so you just point at that and wait for everything to come back, and your instances just keep running. If you have one server you have to do the troubleshooting and recovery work. But you need to run more than one machine to get fewer nines of reliability

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

#157

Can 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.

Available in community edition 8.2+

https://www.mongodb.com/company/blog/product-release-announc...

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

#158

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…

> Why in the world do people choose Mongo over Postgres?

Postgrtes distributed story is more complicated.

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

#159

I feel like we see stories like this more and more. Makes you wonder just how durable the revenue of cloud providers are when self hosting on VMs has never been easier and more cost effective. Then again, nextjs + vercel + gihtub are awfully convenient.

Self hosting requires a different skill set - full blown sysadmin / SRE vs. “The application starts, just deploy it and the PaaS takes care of load balancing, scaling, healing, observability etc”. I’m not defending cloud-esque paas here (I would totally prefer to manage VMs directly) but it should be recognized that it gives some value depending on what you’re comfortable doing with infrastructure.

True, but with the right web framework, much of this comes out of the box.
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