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

231–240 of 343 posts

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#231

Post by therealx »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #53
Patrick-STH wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100%. We had 11 months where nobody touched the racks as an example and the visit 11 months later was the one to physically get a tool I had left there. I mentioned I even track drive time.

For a business with growing needs (most people at the point of making the decision), won't they need to go to install more hardware frequently, if nothing else?

A lot of businesses aren't growing at breakneck speeds, and with modern cpu/ram setups, are often massively underprovisioned. A very big car rental company you'd know the name of was being run on four servers, and they were only upgraded at EOL (if something broke, Dell had same day or next day service)

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#232

Post by therealx »

johnklos wrote: post #106
Rantenki wrote: post #10

TIL: AWS is only expensive if your time has no value. Article neglected to add the cost of labour for setup (edit: aside of racking), maintenance (security updates on infrastructure, etc), and disaster response. It also missed the cost of downtime based on projected MTTR for a failure. The word "fail" only appears once in the page, and not in regards to recovery, only preventative replacement. It's absolutely true th…

This is SO myopic. You think bad things don't happen on AWS? You think that an experienced admin isn't going to spend significantly more time trying to communicate with an actual human at Amazon than fixing a problem on a physically controlled server? This is incredibly naive.

I agree with you, but I can't find a good way to communicate this to the other camp. I wonder if you can't clearly see this without having been a "sysadmin" long before "devops" was a title.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#233

Post by therealx »

mekster wrote: post #165
rootsudo wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very true, Running something on the open Internet is super annoying. If you properly subnet, or restrict to VPN, I can see it as useful but then you have a whole other host of problems to conquer. If you're doing a static page or such, no issue, but the second you're hosting a webapp or need to have a database, yeah.

When you're uninformed and don't know what you're facing, things seem complicated and cloud solutions tend to look very attractive but what is so hard about running a web app? For sake, just spin up a single server somewhere cheaper and run it all in there and vertically scale up after you've put the appropriate monitoring to know when you need to scale up. And put your money where it's worth it.

I agree with you. As counterpoint, I was embarassed for our profession when something like 70% of people in the industry said they were confused with the syntax for httpd.conf

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#234

Post by therealx »

iptrans wrote: post #88

I find it interesting that these comparisons always pit AWS againsta colocation. It would be much more interesting if the comparison was between AWS and dedicated servers. Dedicated servers have all the benefits of colocation, only you don't need to deal with the hardware. The DC takes care of the hardware, all you have to do it administer the server. I find dedicated servers to be very cost effective. You can get of…

Yesh, I'm so tired of the idea that AWS doesn't involve the same management overhead as any other server. It's so far removed from the truth that I wonder if they are shills.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#235

Post by pensatoio »

johnklos wrote: post #106
Rantenki wrote: post #10

TIL: AWS is only expensive if your time has no value. Article neglected to add the cost of labour for setup (edit: aside of racking), maintenance (security updates on infrastructure, etc), and disaster response. It also missed the cost of downtime based on projected MTTR for a failure. The word "fail" only appears once in the page, and not in regards to recovery, only preventative replacement. It's absolutely true th…

This is SO myopic. You think bad things don't happen on AWS? You think that an experienced admin isn't going to spend significantly more time trying to communicate with an actual human at Amazon than fixing a problem on a physically controlled server? This is incredibly naive.

It's both myopic and naive to assume there's a binary set of circumstances that lend an upper hand to self-hosting or cloud hosting.

It's a sliding scale. What makes you money? What's your expected growth? What are your security needs? What experience does your team have?

In this thread, people at each end of the scale are 1. conflating different use cases (wordpress is not the same as a massive, scaled data ingest pipeline) and 2. are ignoring the hidden costs of both.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#236

Post by cinquemb »

KaiserPro wrote: post #129

I'm a bit conflicted about this. Yes, AWS is expensive. And depending on your workload you can certainly save a fair wedge of cash by colo-ing things. For wordpress, (the site that is running serverthehome) its perfectly possible to run it in a lambda, with aggressive caching and save a whole bunch of cash. depending on plugins, load and a number of other things, it could be a potential saving of 90%. (plus a massive…

Yeah, last place I worked had transient loads we pretty much did everything with just ec2 t3a.medium spot instances (minus s3 and rds [which kind sucks with using postgresql if you want to resize down or load from a pg_dump since you cant copy the sql to the rds instance and forced to backup over the network], I wanted to move to ec2 instances and from s3 to b2 since its cheaper for bandwidth with [we had cdn77 in front of cloudfront to lower costs outside of US/EU]).

Using docker or k8s just doubled the costs over just using disk images and custom load-balancing daemon with nginx (with 3rd party modules for changing upstreams without restarts/reloads)/python, on top of adding more networking complexity (like to caching/search/rabbitmq instances). Probably around 20+ machines at peak when i left, but kept them all below 20% cpu. Sad to see so many places go in the docker/k8s direction.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#237

Post by pensatoio »

nikisweeting wrote: post #214
mekster wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those generations of people who grew up by being able to spin up servers with a few mouse clicks, doing that manually seems like a whole level of professional skills.

I feel almost the opposite. The AWS console seems so chaotic and needlessly complex to me compared to the simple familiarity of plugging in a hardware server. Maybe I'm an old geezer already but I'm not even that old!

Terraform is love. Terraform is life.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#238

Post by dragonsh »

The biggest advantage of using self-hosted infrastructure is real freedom from the whims of large cloud providers and the governments who indirectly exercise control over which company, country and individual such cloud providers can do business with.

On a large cloud provider a government notice is enough to remove access to compute resources and data hosted in it. This in essence means company or individual using this cloud services neither own the compute resources and data hosted in it.

On the other hand in self-hosted infrastructure government notice will not block access to resources owned by you and data in those resources. You can respond to notice and continue using those resources until court rules. So it is more freedom than a cloud can offer.

Obviously given the large marketing budget and convenience cloud provider flourish at the expense of freedom.

Self-hosted infrastructure needs a new renaissance given whats happening around the world and how government and large corporation taking away freedom one bite at a time. So it is very essential for development and freedom for humanity to have self-hosted compute, networking and data infrastructure.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#239

Post by ldng »

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…

Except that in smaller places time is of the essence I we don't have enough to learn the full extent of AWS and I'll save my time and money by using a droplet.

Learning AWS does have a cost. Money I'd rather spend on learning and mastering standard, open and portable systems.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#240

Post by waheoo »

Yet another article comparing pricing of self hosting vs self hosting in the cloud.

I'm so shocked. /s

Let me know when you compare the cost of running all of AWS service offerings self hosted.

Post reply on HN