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Use One Big Server (2022)

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Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#211

Post by benjiro »

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…

> At Hetzner, you can rent a machine with 48 cores and 128GB of RAM for the same money.

The problem that Hetzner and a lot of hardware providing hosts have, is the lack of affordable flexibility.

Hetzner their design is based upon a base range of standardized products. This can only be upgraded within a pre-approved range of upgrade options (limited to storage/memory).

Upgrades are often a mixed bag of carefully designed "upgrade paths". As you can expect, upgrades are not cheap. Doubling the storage on a base server, often increases the price of your server by 50 to 75%. The typical customizing will cost you dearly.

This is where AWS wins a lot more. Yes, they are expensive as hell, but you often are not stuck to a base config and a limited upgrade path. The ability to scale beyond what Hetzner can offer is there, and your not forced to overbuy from the start. Transferring between servers is a few buttons and done. With Hetzner, if you did not overspec from the start, your going to do those fun server migrations.

The ironic part is, that buying your own hardware and running it yourself, often ends up paying back within a 8~12 month periode (not counting electricity / internet). And you maintain a lot more flexibility.

* You want to use bifurcation, go for it.

* You want to use consumer 4TB nvme's for second layer read storage (what hetzner refuses to offer as they limited those to 2TB and only one a few servers), go for it.

* You want a 10Gbit interlink between your server, go for it. No need to pay a monthly fee! No need to reserve "future space".

* O, you want a 25Gbit, go for it (hetzner = not possible).

* You want 50Gbit ...

* You want to chuck in a few LLM capable GPUs without breaking the bank...

Its ironic that we are 2025 and Hetzner is stil limited to 1Gbit connection on its hardware, when just about any consumer level hardware has 2.5Gbit by default for years.

Your own hardware gives you the flexibility of AWS and the cost saving beyond Hetzner. Maybe its just my environment, but i see more and more smaller to medium companies going back to their own locally run servers. Not even colocation.

The increase in consumer level fiber, what used to be expensive or not available, has opened the doors for businesses. Most companies do not need insane backbones.

The fact that you can get business fiber 10Gbit for a 100 Euro price in some EU countries (of course never the north), is insane. I even seen some folks combining fiber with starlink & 5G as backup in case their fiber fails/is out.

As long as you fit within a specific usage case that is being offered by Hetzner, they are cheap. But its the moment you step outside that comfort zone, ... This is one of Hetzner weaknesses and where AWS or Self hosted comes back.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#212

Post by benjiro »

ferngodfather wrote: post #195
themafia wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hertzner does on the server the OP was referencing: https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ax162-s/

Most providers do for dedicated servers, or make you agree to a fixed term. I don't believe they do the same for VPS / Cloud servers.

> I don't believe they do the same for VPS / Cloud servers.

Because its backed into the price. If you run a VPS for a month, you get the listed monthly price. But if you run a VPS for a shorter time, the hourly billing price is a lot more expensive.

The ironic part being, that your better off keeping a VPS active until the end of your month periode (if you already crossed 2/3), then its is to cancel early.

Noticed that few people realize that the hourly price != the monthly price.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#213

Post by t_mahmood »

jeroenhd wrote: post #209
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…

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 tha…

> 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.

This is exactly my point. Sorry if I was not clear on my OP.

We are using Seller API to get different product information, while their API provides base work for communicating with their endpoint, you'll have to implement your own system to use that, and handle the absurd unreliability of their API's rate limiter, and the spider web of API callbacks to get information that you require.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#214

Post by benjiro »

gethly wrote: post #144

I run on VPSs as well. I ditched cloud a long time ago. Once my project starts making money, I will definitely buy my own hardware and collocate. Cloud is like dating apps. We had fun for a decade but it's time to get serious and get some things actually done and be productive again.

> I will definitely buy my own hardware and collocate.

Even colocation is often fraud with issues. I shall not mentioned the plectra of dead hardware from datacenter electricity failures. Ironically, my home has more stable electricity then some datacenters lol.

Unless you running a business where a few minutes downtime will cost you millions, most companies can literally run their own servers from their basements. I often see how much people overestimate their need for 99.999% uptime, or bandwidth requirements.

Its not like colocation is that much cheaper. The electricity prices your paying are often more expensive then even business/home electricity. That leave only internet/fiber, and the pletra of commercial fiber these days.

Used to get minimum quoted price of 2k, for a 1Gbit business fiber years ago (not inc install costs). Now you get in some countries, 5 or 10Gbit for 100 Euro business fiber.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#215

Post by data_marsupial »

mrweasel wrote: post #161
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as you also include the Cloud Certified DevOps Engineer™[0] to set up that RDS instance. [0] A normal sysadmin remains vaguely bemused at their job title and the way it changes every couple years.

It's also interesting that the cloud engineer can apparently be both a DBA, network-, storage- and backup engineer, but if you move the same services on-prem, you apparently need specialists for each task. Sometimes even the certified cloud engineers can't tell you why an RDS behaves the way it does, nor can they really fix it. Sometimes you really do need a DBA, but that applies equally to on-prem and cloud. I'm a s…

Need to get Platform Engineer for a full house

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#216

Post by tgtweak »

I've been doing hybrid colo+public cloud for over a decade and it's always been the most cost effective route at a certain scale. That specific break even point is lowering over time with the density and cost effectiveness of hardware.

Sure you need net/infra admins but the software and hardware these days are pretty management friendly and you'll find you still need (often more expensive "cloud") admins so you're not offsetting much management cost there.

Colocation is plentiful and providers often aggregate and resell bandwidth from their preferred carriers.

At one point we were up to 8 dell vrtx clusters and a few SANs, with 500+ VMs from huge msSQL servers to kube clusters the public cloud bill would have been well into the 6 figures even with preferred pricing and reserved instances. Our colocation bill was $2400/mo and that was mostly for power. The one thing that always surprised me was how much faster everything was - every time we had to scale-over into the cloud the public cloud node was noticably slower even for identical CPU generations and vcpu.

You need to be very keen about server deals, updates, support contracts and licenses - but it's really manageable and interconnecting with the cloud is trivial at this point - you can get a "cloud connect" fiber drop to your preferred cloud provider and connect your colo infra to your vpc.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#217

Post by benreesman »

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…

In 2025 if you need convenience and no red tape you've got fly.io in the general case and maybe Vercel or something on a particular framework (there are some good ones for a particular stack).

If your needs go beyond that? Then you need real computers with real configuration and you have OVH/Hetzner/Latitude who will rent you MONSTER machines for the cost of some cheap-ass surplus 2017 Intel on The Cloud.

And if you just want a blog or whatever? Zillion VPS options.

The traditional cloud is for regulatory/process/corruption capture extraction in 2025: its machine economics and developer productivity use case is fucking zero I've seen. Maybe there's some edge case where a completely unencumbered team is better off with DMV trip permissions theatre, remnant Intel racked with noisy neighbors at massive markup, and no support recourse.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#218

Post by jgalt212 »

ldoughty wrote: post #113
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 agree that AWS EC2 is probably too expensive on the whole. It also doesn't really provide any of the greater benefits of the cloud that come from "someone else's server". However, to the point of microservices as the article mentions, you probably should look at lambda (or fargate, or a mix) unless you can really saturate the capacity of multiple servers. When we swapped to ECS+EC2 running microservices over to lam…

> I agree that AWS EC2 is probably too expensive on the whole.

Probably? It's about 5-10X more expensive than equivalent services from Hetzner.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#219

Post by Havoc »

vidarh wrote: post #109
Havoc wrote: post #79

>Unfortunately, since all of your services run on servers (whether you like it or not), someone in that supply chain is charging you based on their peak load. This seems fundamentally incorrect to me? If I need 100 units of peak compute during 8 hours of work hours, I get that from Big Cloud, and they have two other clients needing same in offset timezones then in theory the aggregate cost of that is 1/3rd of everyon…

But they generally don't. Most people don't have large enough daily fluctuations for these demand curves to flatten out enough. And the providers also need enough capacity to handle unforeseen spikes. Which is also why none of them will let you scale however far you want - they still impose limits so they can plan the excess they need.

> And the providers also need enough capacity to handle unforeseen spikes.

Indeed but the headroom the cloud needs overall is less than every customers individual worst case scenarios added up. They’d take a percentage of that total because statistically a situation where 100% of customers are at 100% of their peak at 100% same point in time is improbable

Must admit little surprised this logic isn’t self evident

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#220

Post by benjiro »

Nextgrid wrote: post #83
PaulKeeble wrote: post #75

I often wonder if my home NAS/Server would be better off put onto a rented box or a cloud server somewhere, especially since I now have 1gbit/s internet. Even now the 20TB of drive space and 6 Cores with 32GB on Hetzner with a dedicated is about twice the price of buying the hardware over a 5 year period. I suspect the hardware will actually last longer than that and its the same level of redundancy (RAID) on a rente…

It really depends on your power costs. In certain parts of Europe, power is so expensive that Hetzner actually works out cheaper (despite them providing you the entire machine and datacenter-grade internet connection).

Trust me, even with 35 cent/kwh (Germany), its easy to make it work. Just do not buy enterprise hardware. People are obsessed with running racks full of often obsolete hardware, that is not designed around energy efficiency.

Here is a fun one ...

https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1dqq3h8/my_12x_...

Dude is running 12x AMD 6600HS with a power draw between 300 a 400W. The compute alone is easily 3x of a equivalent Hetzner 48c server. We shall not mention the that inc 768GB of memory (people underestimate how much high capacity rdimms draw in power).

The main issue with Hetzner is, as long as you only use their base configuration servers, they are very competitive. The issue is, if you start to step a little bit out of line, the prices simply skyrocket. Try adding more storage to some servers, memory, or you need a higher interconnect between your servers (limited to 10Gbit).

Even basic consumer hardware comes with 2.5Gbit, yet, Hetzner is in the stone ages with 1Gbit. I remember the time when Hetzner introduced 1Gbit. Hetzner was innovation, and progression. But that has been slowly vanishing. Hetzner has been getting more and more lazy. You see the issue also with their cloud offerings storage. Look at Netcup, even Strato etc... They barely introduce anything new anymore, and when something comes its often less competitive or broken. The whole S3 costing Backblaze price levels and non-stop issues.

You can tell they are the only company that every pushed for consumer hardware hosting on mass scale, what made them a small monopoly in the market. And it shows if your a old customer, and know their history. Hey, do people remember the price increases for the auction hardware because of the Ukraine invasion. Do not worry folks, when the electricity prices go down, we will adjust them down. O, we are pre-war prices for almost 2 years. Where is that promised price drops? Hehehe ...

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