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Self-Hosting Still Pays

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Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#181

Post by Baeocystin »

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…

I work with small businesses, and 90% of the time, they are better served by running a few VMs in a 1U Xeon-powered rackmount Synology or the like.

Does it have a lot of compute power? No.

Is it dirt-simple to admin, and have enough horsepower to do the simple things like run a QuickBooks server on a Windows VM, Fileshare on another, test on a third, etc that is all they usually need? Absolutely!

It isn't uncommon at all that I make my initial IT inventory at a new client's business and find that they are spending hundreds to thousands/month unnecessarily in overblown costs, and AWS is a primary driver of that. A few kilobucks in to owned hardware, and the problem is essentially solved for a few years, and paid for in a few months. Everybody wins.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#182

Post by trianglem »

chmod775 wrote: post #146

I mean yeah, AWS is a 10-100x markup over running your own stuff. I run a file hosting site that serves >500TB of data to about 2 million monthly users on a bunch of dedicated servers that cost me about $500 a month. If I ran this on AWS it would cost me more than $20,000 every month . I could hire four system administrators to do nothing but look after each of my four dedicated servers for that money. It's completel…

Same. I’ve been in places that self host and it’s not nearly enough to overcome what AWS (in my case Azure) charge. 99.5% uptime in contracts lets you realistically have a lot of downtime to fix your problems. That’s more than 400 hours of acceptable downtime. We’re in the process of making the switch and we project to pay 30% of what we’re currently paying.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#183

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

shiftpgdn wrote: post #4

You don't even need to buy a new EPYC or Xeon Scalable system. A 20 core Xeon v3/v4 system with 128gb of ram can be had off lease for $1000. Psychz.net provides 1u colocation with 1/Gbs link (10/Gbs burst) for $80/mo. Equivalent EC2 is $300-600/month with no better reliability. Plus you have to deal with noisy neighbors and bandwidth overages. Build your baseline usage in colo and burst into AWS unless you like buyin…

> Psychz.net

lol

I don't think I've ever had a non-dodgy packet arrive from Psychz network.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#184

Post by cutler »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #155
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…

I agree that scalability is rarely an appropriate reason to go in on AWS; however, “managed services” is a really good reason. You don’t have to operate your own equivalent services, but rather you pay for Amazon engineers to operate them on your behalf. Of course, there are some people for whom running their own services is the more appropriate scenario, but I think this is not a good default for anything more compl…

That Rails app might just be the next Stripe, Shopify or AirBnB.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#185

Post by throwaway894345 »

cutler wrote: post #184
throwaway894345 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that scalability is rarely an appropriate reason to go in on AWS; however, “managed services” is a really good reason. You don’t have to operate your own equivalent services, but rather you pay for Amazon engineers to operate them on your behalf. Of course, there are some people for whom running their own services is the more appropriate scenario, but I think this is not a good default for anything more compl…

That Rails app might just be the next Stripe, Shopify or AirBnB.

I’m not sure what point you’re making exactly, but Stripe and AirBnB (not sure about Shopify) are all on AWS.

> A year after Airbnb launched, the company decided to migrate nearly all of its cloud computing functions to Amazon Web Services (AWS) because of service administration challenges experienced with its original provider. Nathan Blecharczyk, Co-founder & CTO of Airbnb says, “Initially, the appeal of AWS was the ease of managing and customizing the stack. It was great to be able to ramp up more servers without having to contact anyone and without having minimum usage commitments. As our company continued to grow, so did our reliance on the AWS cloud and now, we’ve adopted almost all of the features AWS provides. AWS is the easy answer for any Internet business that wants to scale to the next level.”

> Since 2011, Stripe has delivered its PCI-compliant payment platform entirely on AWS, relying on the security best practices as well as easy auditability of the AWS platform. Stripe wants to make it easier than ever for developers to process payments on their web and mobile applications. Using AWS provides Stripe with access to a world-class infrastructure that helps it scale seamlessly and increase developer productivity.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#186

Post by mlboss »

cortesoft wrote: post #177
Zelphyr wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds to me like you're describing a corporate environment with all the bureaucracy that comes with such an environment. That scenario likely has the traffic and revenue to justify a full AWS build out. I'm talking about new projects at much smaller companies, or much smaller departments within the company that don't yet know if the product they're building is going to even work. Not to mention; I have the same f…

I am confused how DigitalOcean is different than AWS? Why is a $10/mo DO droplet different than a small EC2 instance?

Compute wise they may be same but configuration wise EC2 instance is a super complex.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#187

Post by 908B64B197 »

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…

It all depends on how your dev's compensation is structured.

AWS has great reliability and a complete ecosystem of plug-and-play offerings that just work. And it's well documented. It sure is more expensive, but it's easier to achieve the same result. And faster. And keep in mind, the dev isn't footing the AWS bill. And isn't getting paid a penny extra for trimming down said AWS bill.

Of course, if you add stocks to the compensation structure or a bonus based on cloud spending, that changes the incentives.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#188

Post by busterarm »

wolco2 wrote: post #179
busterarm wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LightSail isn't any cheaper than the EC2 instance types backing it. Everything else (VPCs, IAM roles, etc) doesn't have a cost associated. What you're missing is that cost/complexity-wise, LightSail and EC2 are equivalent. The only difference between them is your interface to it. LightSail doesn't give you some pretty necessary knobs to kick things into a working state when the EC2 instances are having a burger. In f…

"Linode is frequently the target of massive global DDOS. I remember well a few years ago the Christmas Eve Linode DDOS because I had to work 20 hours that day." Those sound like some of the weakest reasons. Is your information still upto date? Are they still experiencing major outages? The truth is it would save you money to use a digitalocean instance over aws, regardless of your edge cases where some network proper…

I can't really get into specifics, but the particular issue that we have with DO (and it really is specific to DO/droplets) makes it a complete no-go for our new product architecture.

It doesn't save us money if we can't use it.

As for my reasons being weak, you might have read other places in this thread where I've mentioned that I'm responsible for

a) a multi-million dollar infrastructure, b) across clouds and on-prem in tier 1 datacenters c) have been in this field for a long time.

Odds are that I'm not a total idiot, that I have good information and that I know what I'm doing here.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#189

Post by sokoloff »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #160
throwaway894345 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that scalability is rarely an appropriate reason to go in on AWS; however, “managed services” is a really good reason. You don’t have to operate your own equivalent services, but rather you pay for Amazon engineers to operate them on your behalf. Of course, there are some people for whom running their own services is the more appropriate scenario, but I think this is not a good default for anything more compl…

It's not that Amazon has worse engineers: They have great engineers. The difference is they are Amazon's engineers, not your engineers. My IT team is not going to break something on the most important day of the month for my business. Sometimes even when I want to do something mundane on the network, it's "eh, let's wait until not (insert key date here), just in case". Amazon does not care what day is important to my…

O365 had a couple of bad years, earning the nickname "Office 360" for a while.

This year, I can only recall a single outage and we've been overall happy with it. O365 costs more than an Exchange server only in part because it comes bundled with all of MS-Office.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#190

Post by sokoloff »

mekster wrote: post #162
drchopchop wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't get force-rebooted that often, I have EC2 instances that have been up for over 365 days with no issues. Setting up instances, managing updates, adding IAM perms is orders of magnitude faster/easier than dealing with rack-and-stack data centers. Full downtime isn't that frequent, either. The Kinesis outage on Wednesday didn't affect any of our USE1 functionality, with the exception of maybe Cloudfront propa…

I don't remember them force rebooting for nearly 10 years. A server is easily surviving over 1000 days and it's usually our side that needs to reboot.

I agree in general, though many were affected by the 2014 Xen security issue.
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