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

Self-Hosting Still Pays

servethehome.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 343 posts

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#201

Post by ericpauley »

kayson wrote: post #141
ericpauley wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you including having someone on call who can drive to the colo on a moment's notice? Unless your hardware is redundant and remotely swappable then you need to be ready for physical disaster response. Cloud providers abstract this away for a price.

That's what he means by "remote hands"

Not true. In the article remote hands refers to actual hours of maintenance performed ($640 for 4 hours). The cost of having a human on call to solve hardware problems is far higher than that.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#202

Post by vmurthy »

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…

>When ("if" is more often the case) that client starts to see the kinds of traffic that necessitates a full-scale AWS

Bang on. The capex costs of BYO IT setup was the bugbear(real one FWIW) that AWS and other cloud providers were trying to avoid. But if a lot of folks are paying lots of money upfront preparing for "scale" that might never happen, they aren't really saving capex are they?

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#203

Post by joana035 »

That's is great, not to mention you get real CPUs, no throttling inside your LAN, real storage.

The cloud makes you addicted to the "but you have to scale" by selling 2 to 4 vCPUs plus 8 to 16GB of memory for the same price you can get a 12 vCPU with 64 or 128GB somewhere else.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#204

Post by ProAm »

marcinzm wrote: post #140
ProAm wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a lot there, and some of it is apples to apples and some is definitely apples to oranges. I'm just saying overall you have the same number of headaches, they are just different headaches. Just last week there was significant degradation that took quite some time to be admitted (admitted might be the wrong word but everyone seemed to know there was an issue with AWS before AWS said their was an issue) > I don…

>Why would this need to be done if initial implementation was planned and done correctly? Anyone who thinks they planned everything correctly is just deluding themselves. Admitting you've fucked up, don't know how you fucked up yet but will one day need to fix the fuckup is very important in engineering.

It's possible but not to think enough through the process that you need to create purchases orders large enough to need approvals? However if you don't have a basic understanding of hardware you'll need you probably shouldn't be working/in charge of this proejct anyhow. If you fked up this bad you're in for a bad time regardless of where you've decided to host.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#205

Post by ericpauley »

I have a hard time believing the setup pictured offers equivalent reliability/disaster recovery to "cloud" hosting.

As far as I can tell, all traffic is being routed through two servers. These servers are running Linux? What happens when a routine software update bricks your routing (it could happen to anyone). Without remote access you need someone to go in and fix this. Do you have after hours access? Is someone nearby on call to respond to complex issues in person? Not all physical problems can be solved by a random colo tech.

Colocation (as pictured) lacks management of a lot of variables that could lead to big problems. When your downtime targets are in minutes per year any incident requiring physical response is unacceptable.

A simple Google search reveals a service philosophy compatible with this hosting[1]:

> As with all web systems, at some point, downtime is required.

For the rest of us there's "cloud" hosting.

[1] https://www.servethehome.com/pardon-dust-upgrades-progress/

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#206

Post by User23 »

Zelphyr wrote: post #60
busterarm wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scalability itself isn't the selling point. It's freedom. It's the freedom to get things wrong, iterate and try again. It's the freedom to move resources around. It's the freedom of not having to wait for your procurement process and approval from a purchasing department. It's the freedom of not having to wait for your operations team to plug in and configure bare metal. And all of these freedoms have compounding int…

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…

Amazon itself used to be that environment. Before AWS was adopted internally, which it wasn't for some time, to say nothing of the many years before it was created, getting capacity involved a weeks or even months long political game with the infrastructure team. Even infrastructure devs had to struggle to find resources. Hiring managers would literally horse trade their spare capacity.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#207

Post by welterde »

ericpauley wrote: post #201
kayson wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what he means by "remote hands"

Not true. In the article remote hands refers to actual hours of maintenance performed ($640 for 4 hours). The cost of having a human on call to solve hardware problems is far higher than that.

There is no need to have anyone on call yourself to drive to the colo, since any decent colocation provider will have staff on-site 24/7 to perform any physical intervention required.

Part of that you pay through your colocation bill and part you pay by the hour (depending on your contract/provider).

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#208

Post by joana035 »

busterarm wrote: post #51
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…

Scalability itself isn't the selling point. It's freedom. It's the freedom to get things wrong, iterate and try again. It's the freedom to move resources around. It's the freedom of not having to wait for your procurement process and approval from a purchasing department. It's the freedom of not having to wait for your operations team to plug in and configure bare metal. And all of these freedoms have compounding int…

Cloud is the opposite of Freedom.

You can get things wrong, iterate and try again with basically anything.

Assuming that everything else other than cloud is automatically bad and full of bureaucracy does not inspire anyone.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#209

Post by segmondy »

mekster wrote: post #157
segmondy wrote: post #121

AWS gains is like a bell curve, the value is highest in the middle. If you're very small, you probably don't need it, and DigitalOcean without surprise costs should do. When you start getting large enough, AWS starts paying off, as you get really huge, then it might be cheaper to colocate and hire your own admins. However, I think Netflix shows you can't be too big tho for AWS. Their hybrid approach is probably best.…

Places like netflix wants to put liability off its shoulders and wants someone to blame at. Very different demand than most.

I don't buy that, liability to who? If Netflix goes down, I'm gonna cry and tweet about it, I'm not going to cancel my account. Their catalog is unmatched. colocating across the world is not easy, they also have scale that goes up and down based on time of day, and say holidays where they really need to scale up. Cloud is great for that, the elastic part is great, place the core on there and scale up and down as needed. What they did with active-active resiliency and being able to shift traffic across regions is the entire point of cloud, as we some a bunch of services where down last week with AWS having issue but netflix never skips a beat on such issues.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#210

Post by ClumsyPilot »

busterarm wrote: post #200
wolco2 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are probably an expert in your area but the original poster was talking about much smaller shops. That's the point being missed for every multi-million dollar spender there are thousands of smaller projects paying 10x the cost because they think they will be you one day and it is cheaper to build on that stack from day one.

Yeah, I'm saying that you can use this cost effectively at smaller places too. When I think of my core Terraform infrastructure that I can spin up for any project, the only resource with a recurring AWS/Google/Azure cost is NAT Gateways. You can get very cost-competitive with the instances themselves with reservations and/or spot, depending on your architecture. The costs of the big clouds and the small ones is basic…

> "they give you rope to hang yourself with."

That's not a triviality - C++ has the same problem, if you have a single ezpert individual it's great, but if you have a team, and some are very green, it will be a nightmare.

Post reply on HN