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

181–190 of 406 posts

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

#181

Post by sz4kerto »

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 think compliance is one of the key advantages of cloud. When you go through SOC2 or ISO27001, you can just tick off entire categories of questions by saying 'we host on AWS/GCP/Azure'.

It's really shitty that we all need to pay this tax, but I've been just asked about whether our company has armed guards and redundant HVAC systems in our DC, and I wouldn't know how to do that apart from saying that 'our cloud provider has all of those'.

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

#182

Post by DANmode »

normie3000 wrote: post #180
DANmode wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/04/google-accidentally-sent-som...

So security's too hard for Google. But if this happens at work and we're using Google Cloud, I say "sorry boss, Google messed up". If we're running our own servers, who do I blame?

Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM!

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

#183

Post by locknitpicker »

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…

> That being said, the cloud does have a lot of advantages:

Another advantage is that if you aim to provide a global service consumed throughout the world then cloud providers allow you to deploy your services in a multitude of locations in separate continents. This alone greatly improves performance. And you can do that with a couple of clicks.

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

#184

Post by Aeolun »

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?

Buy a pretty basic HDD? These days 12 TB isn’t all that much?

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

#185

Post by ffsm8 »

jaredhallen wrote: post #114
veqq wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In English, x or time(s) after a number marks a "unit" used by various verbs. A 10x increase. Increase by 10x. Go up 10x. Some of these verbs are negative like decrease or save. "Save 10x" is the same as "divide by 10". Four times less, 5 times smaller etc. are long attested.

Agree to disagree.

It's basically multiplication with fractions, just like you get 1/4 from 1/2 * 1/2, which is once again a multiplication that turns into division

I agree that it's a suboptimal and click baity way to phrase it though...

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

#186

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

jen729w wrote: post #152
selcuka wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Careful what you wish for. Netlify sent a guy a $104k bill from the free plan. Thankfully social media outage saved the guy.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39520776

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

#187

Post by JCM9 »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #161
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…

> The biggest threat to cloud vendors is that everyone wakes up tomorrow and cost optimizes the crap out of their infrastructure Well there's no danger of that. Even with AWS telling you exactly how to save money (they have a thousand different dashboards showing you where you can save, and even support will tell you), it'll still take you months to work through all the cost optimization changes. Since it's annoying…

Yes, the partner resale model of AWS has been a total mess for a while.

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

#188

Post by ngc248 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #117
rtpg wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Figuring out how to do db backups _can_ also be fairly time consuming. There's a question of whether you want to spend time learning AWS or spend time learning your DB's hand-rolled backup options (on top of the question of whether learning AWS's thing even absolves you of understanding your DB's internals anyways!) I do think there's value in "just" doing a thing instead of relying on the wrapper. Whether that's eas…

> Figuring out how to do db backups _can_ also be fairly time consuming. apt install automysqlbackup autopostgresqlbackup Though if you have proper filesystem snapshots then they should always see your database as consistent, right? So you can even skip database tools and just learn to make and download snapshots.

nah filesystem snapshots may not lead to consistent DB backups. DB backup software usually use a plugin to tell the DB to coalesce data before taking a snapshot.

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

#189

Post by c0balt »

selcuka wrote: post #143
wheybags wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> one of the couple dozen databases I guess this is one of those use cases that justify the cloud. It's hard to host that reliably at home.

Not too push the point too hard, but a "dev environment" for a product is for a business (not an individual consumer). Having a server (rack) in an office is not that hard, but alas the cloud might be better here for ease of administration.

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

#190

Post by lelanthran »

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…

> all in all from the moment of ordering to fully operational was about 10 minutes tops.

I think this is an important point. It's quick.

When cloud got popular, doing what you did could take upwards of 3 months in an organisation, with some being closer to 8 months. The organisational bureaucracy meant that any asset purchase was a long procedure.

So, yeah, the choices were:

1. Wait 6 months to spend out of capex budget

Or

2. Use the opex budget and get something in 10m.

We are no longer in that phase, so cloud services makes very little sense now because you can still use the opex budget to get a VPS and have in going in minutes with automation.

Post reply on HN