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Use One Big Server (2022)

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Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#201

Post by benterix »

bspammer wrote: post #84
matt-p wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference between a fairly expensive ($300) RDS instance + EC2 in the same region vs a $90 dedicated server with a NVME drive and postgres in a container is absolutely insane.

A fair comparison would include the cost of the DBA who will be responsible for backups, updates, monitoring, security and access control. That’s what RDS is actually competing with.

You are aware that RDS needs backups, setting up monitoring properly, defining access, providing secrets management etc., and updates between major versions are not automatic?

RDS has a value. But for many teams the price paid for this value is ridiculously high when compared to other options.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#202

Post by lelanthran »

talles wrote: post #3

Don't forget the cost of managing your one big server and the risk of having such single point of failure.

> Don't forget the cost of managing your one big server

Is that more, less than or about the same as having an AWS/Azure/GCP consultant?

What's the difference in labour per hour?

> the risk of having such single point of failure.

At the prices they charge I can have two hot failovers in two other datacenter and still come out ahead.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#203

Post by benterix »

vidarh wrote: post #105
bspammer wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fair comparison would include the cost of the DBA who will be responsible for backups, updates, monitoring, security and access control. That’s what RDS is actually competing with.

I do consulting in this space, and we consistently make more money from people who insist on using cloud services, because their setups tend to need far more work.

Similar here - but in my case the reason is because of vendor lock-in - they spent years getting into AWS and any thought of getting out seems dreadful.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#204

Post by benterix »

jpgvm wrote: post #118
zenmac wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but AWS SRE are what making the big bucks! Soooo what can you do? It is nice to see many people here on HN are supporting open network and platform and making very drastic comments as to encouraging google engineers to quite their jobs. I totally also understand why some people with family to support mortgage to pay they can't just walk way from a job at FAANG or MAMAA type place. Looking at your comparison, thi…

Right now the big bucks are in managing massive bare metal GPU clusters.

Yeah, let's use the opportunity while it lasts.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#205

Post by benterix »

3shv wrote: post #189
t_mahmood wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get why people are so hell-bent on going to AWS, for the most minor applications, without looking at simpler options! I am not even thousands km near the level of what you are doing, but my client was paying $100/m for an AWS server, SQS and S3 bucket, for a small PHP based web application that uses Amazon Seller API, Keepa API for the products he ships. Used MySQL for data storage. I implemented the whole th…

What are some cheaper and better hosting providers that you can recommend?

Hetzner.

For most public cloud providers you have to give them your credit card number so they can charge an arbitrary amount.

For Hetzner, instead of CC#, you give a scan of your ID (of course you can attach your CC too or Paypal). Personally I do my payments via a bank transfer. I recently paid for the whole 2025 and 2026 for all my k8s clusters. It gives unimaginable peace of mind when compared to AWS/GCP/Azure.

Plus, their cloud instances often spin up much faster than EC2.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#206

Post by benterix »

Demiurge wrote: post #53
runako wrote: post #26

One of the more detrimental aspects of the Cloud Tax is that it constrains the types of solutions engineers even consider. Picking an arbitrary price point of $200/mo, you can get 4(!) vCPUs and 16GB of RAM at AWS. Architectures are different etc., but this is roughly a mid-spec dev laptop of 5 or so years ago. At Hetzner, you can rent a machine with 48 cores and 128GB of RAM for the same money. It's hard to overstat…

I think it’s the other way around. I’m a huge fan of Hetzner for small sites with a few users. However, for bigger projects, the cloud seems to offer a complete lack of constraints. For projects that can pay for my time, $200/m or $2000/m in hosting costs is a negligible difference. What’s the development cost difference between AWS CDK / Terraform + GitHub Actions vs. Docker / K8s / Ansible + any CI pipeline? I don’…

> I’m a huge fan of Hetzner ... I don’t see how “bare metal” saves much engineering time.

I think you confuse Heztner with bare metal. Hetzner has Hetzner Cloud which is like AWS EC2 but much cheaper. (They also have bare metal servers which are even cheaper.) With Heztner Cloud, you can use Terraform, Github Actions and whatever else you mentioned.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#207

Post by t_mahmood »

choeger wrote: post #188
t_mahmood wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get why people are so hell-bent on going to AWS, for the most minor applications, without looking at simpler options! I am not even thousands km near the level of what you are doing, but my client was paying $100/m for an AWS server, SQS and S3 bucket, for a small PHP based web application that uses Amazon Seller API, Keepa API for the products he ships. Used MySQL for data storage. I implemented the whole th…

How much did that reimplementing cost and when will the savings exceed that cost?

This costed around $10k. Which also includes work that is outside the reimplementation.

I do not know how much actually cost of the original application.

The app, that I was developing, was for another purpose, and the reimplementation was later added.

The app replaces an existing commercial app that is being used, which is $200+/m. So, may be 4/5 years to exceed the savings. They have been using the app for 3 years, I think.

And, maybe I am beating my drum a little, I believe my implementation works, and looks much better than the commercial or the first implementation.

So, I am really looking forward for this to success.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#208

Post by t_mahmood »

3shv wrote: post #189
t_mahmood wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get why people are so hell-bent on going to AWS, for the most minor applications, without looking at simpler options! I am not even thousands km near the level of what you are doing, but my client was paying $100/m for an AWS server, SQS and S3 bucket, for a small PHP based web application that uses Amazon Seller API, Keepa API for the products he ships. Used MySQL for data storage. I implemented the whole th…

What are some cheaper and better hosting providers that you can recommend?

I have used Knownhost previously, it served me really well.

Before that, I used to go for Linode, but I think they've become more pricey?

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#209

Post by jeroenhd »

t_mahmood wrote: post #184
runako wrote: post #26

One of the more detrimental aspects of the Cloud Tax is that it constrains the types of solutions engineers even consider. Picking an arbitrary price point of $200/mo, you can get 4(!) vCPUs and 16GB of RAM at AWS. Architectures are different etc., but this is roughly a mid-spec dev laptop of 5 or so years ago. At Hetzner, you can rent a machine with 48 cores and 128GB of RAM for the same money. It's hard to overstat…

I don't get why people are so hell-bent on going to AWS, for the most minor applications, without looking at simpler options! I am not even thousands km near the level of what you are doing, but my client was paying $100/m for an AWS server, SQS and S3 bucket, for a small PHP based web application that uses Amazon Seller API, Keepa API for the products he ships. Used MySQL for data storage. I implemented the whole th…

AWS is useful for big business. Automatic multi region failover and hosted databases may be expensive, but they're a massive pain to manually configure and an easy footgun if you're not used to doing that sort of thing. Plus, with Amazon you already have public toolkits to use those features with all of your services, so you don't need to figure how to integrate/what open source system to use to accomplish all of that. Plus, if you go for your own physical server, you need to arrange parts and maintenance windows for any hardware that will eventually fail.

If all you need is "good enough" reliability and basic compute power (which I think is good enough for many businesses, considering AWS isn't exactly outage free either), you're probably better off getting a server or renting one from a cheap cloud host. If you're promising five nines of uptime for some reason, you may want to reconsider.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#210

Post by juped »

motorest wrote: post #179
juped wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you actually think dead simple failover is comparable to elastic kubernetes whatever?

> Do you actually think dead simple failover is comparable to elastic kubernetes whatever? References to "elastic Kubernetes whatever" is a red herring. You can have a dead simple load balancer spreading traffic across multiple bare metal nodes.

Thanks for switching sides to oppose yourself, I guess?
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