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I got pwned by my cloud costs

troyhunt.com

231–240 of 657 posts

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#231
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason Europeans tend to favor European service providers generally has to do with strong data protection guarantees and some level of protection against foreign surveillance. In practice a lot of European companies still use US services or at least services provided by US companies -- Troy Hunt is Australian and uses Azure from Microsoft, so this isn't just a thing Europeans do either. I'd love to hear your reas…

> I'd love to hear your reasoning why people who aren't European would prefer to avoid European service providers. I'm generally a Hetzner fan as well for global services, but I can see the point in avoiding Hetzner (for example) if all of your users are in the US, since Hetzner only offers dedicated servers located in Europe (Germany and Finland if I'm not mistaken). Generally you want users to hit servers that are…

https://www.hetzner.com/?country=us

They also have dc's in the US

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably would run just fine on a <= 4 euro/month virtual machine too. Of course it doesn't quite scale to zero like APIGW,lambda,etc. but on the other hand you can be fairly confident to not pay more if your pet project suddenly lands on the front page of HN.

Keep in mind that the "<= 4 euro/month virtual machine" has maybe 256MB of RAM available and running anything beyond nginx + a web server which needs to be cycled every few days due to memory fragmentation can become challenging. I've tried this many times, but it's just not worth the extra hassle. And I want a vpn, monitoring and database even on the toy project server as a minimum in reality.

A stardust instance on scaleway comes to less than 2 EUR per month and it has 1G of RAM and runs a toy project or even a small personal infra just fine :)

EDIT: Personally I pay 9-10 EUR per month to Scaleway for a 2G RAM and 2 CPU VPS, private docker repo and S3-compatible storage which holds data and some backups, which run both my personal services and some toy projects when needed. I am not affiliated with them in any way

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really extreme. How about: Keep in mind that any review may be paid for? FWIW, he complained a lot about Ubiquiti issues on his podcast, so it's not like he can't say bad things about them. (as in half an episode about the controller dropping his configuration or something like that) > selling on stolen password data [...] that he will never talk about How do you know about it then? That's really a [citation n…

Quoted post unavailable.

I was quoting you. But I'm sure you could figure out the meaning anyway: what's the source for that information that you claim he keeps a secret.

Partially it even works the other way - FBI and others are feeding data into hibp https://www.troyhunt.com/open-source-pwned-passwords-with-fb...

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#234
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To make a fair comparison you need to consider the time cost for setting all of that other stuff up compared to having it out of the box. I'd an engineer on 100k takes a week to get it up and running then your vps cost 2k to set up and 40/month going forwards.

True, but setting things up on AWS isn’t free either.

That's true - if you want to make a fair comparison between the two you need to consider the costs of the setup on AWS vs the cost of setting it up on whatever your platform of choice is. For a small team with no/development only loads, then a $5 digital ocean droplet would likely work for them, maybe even 10 of them. It's not worth managing a VPS for deploying 5 containers when you can have DO do it for $25 behind a load balancer. For a small team with moderate load, the question is "is it worth spending X on setup to save Y but potentially spend Z on maintenance of the systems on Hetzner/whoever, vs spending A on setup, B on compute and C on maintenance". If the difference is For a large company, it's not about $ cost, it's about risk management and avoiding cost centers.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#235
post #56

Can somebody explain to me why I wouldn't just rent a 40 EUR dedicated server from Hetzner with unlimited traffic and gigabit uplink? His 600GB/day is way less than what you get over a gigabit link within a day. Sure, sudden bursts would perhaps "throttle" at a gigabit, but according to his article that was only the cloudflare proxy anyhow, so no pain in having that take a few seconds longer. As far as I am concerned…

>As far as I am concerned, I just don't understand why people use cloud services.

Well that's the first issue. Many people have automated large parts of their infrastructure in this way so that distributing one huge file becomes part of that whole mess. The goal is of course to keep costs down to a minimum. You can actually do a lot with little money using cloud services.

But the careful balance is that you can easily miss little details. But how does that differ from any systems administration? The details are just in new areas that didn't exist 5-10 years ago.

And the details you miss are more likely to increase cost. And when you process a lot of traffic, you're popular, that can go real fast.

20 years ago in hosting we might get a porn stash on a hacked NT4 server that would draw bandwidth. And back then a whole company might have 100Mbit fiber so you'd notice.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd love to hear your reasoning why people who aren't European would prefer to avoid European service providers. I'm generally a Hetzner fan as well for global services, but I can see the point in avoiding Hetzner (for example) if all of your users are in the US, since Hetzner only offers dedicated servers located in Europe (Germany and Finland if I'm not mistaken). Generally you want users to hit servers that are…

https://www.hetzner.com/?country=us They also have dc's in the US

Are we talking about the same thing? I know Hetzner offers Cloud servers (VMs) in the US since recently, but I don't think they offer Dedicated Servers in the US (yet?).

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If an engineer needs that much time you have a serious technical debt for setup of your software or a inexperienced or inept engineer. The developer or at least operators need to be able to setup your software for more frequently for testing anyway, if they cannot do that rather quick you got other problems.. I can set up Proxmox VE as hyper visor, some container for each DBs, load balancer in front and some app in a…

> If an engineer needs that much time you have a serious technical debt for setup of your software or a inexperienced or inept engineer. Everyone does something for the first time once. Just because someone has not set up a hypervisor before doesn't mean they're inexperienced. > I can set up Proxmox VE as hyper visor, some container for each DBs, load balancer in front and some app in about an hour max from scratch,…

>Just because someone has not set up a hypervisor before doesn't mean they're inexperienced.

Wait, what? If you never did something, then you're unexperienced, ain't you?

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#238
post #56

Can somebody explain to me why I wouldn't just rent a 40 EUR dedicated server from Hetzner with unlimited traffic and gigabit uplink? His 600GB/day is way less than what you get over a gigabit link within a day. Sure, sudden bursts would perhaps "throttle" at a gigabit, but according to his article that was only the cloudflare proxy anyhow, so no pain in having that take a few seconds longer. As far as I am concerned…

Just did the calc and 600GB/day is about 55Mbit/s. That's really not a lot and if there's not too much computation server-side you could serve this from a raspberry pi at home (provided you have good uplink). But that's assuming you keep the CloudFlare cache of course, or as author mentioned himself, advertising only torrents for the multi-gig files.

I really don't understand the cloud craze. Everything is more complex to debug, more expensive, and more shitty in all the possible ways you can imagine. I mean i was not exactly a fan of the VPS craze 10-15 years ago, but at least it wouldn't automatically ruin your bank account whenever you got a little traffic.

Kudos to the author for having so much money (thousands in one month?!) to waste. I wish i did too :)

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#239
Most of the clouds have functionalities to manage this. In AWS for example you can create an alarm with AWS Budget to monitor costs by tools/service/etc. Using a complex cloud without using this is not good practice.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#240
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Azure offers a Cloudflare alternative, and I'm not sure they ever would - Cloudflare is too good and too cheap to compete against.

It's not that good. I'm constantly getting "Access Blocked" to various websites by Cloudflare trying to protect them....from me reading them.

Same here. I live in Turkey and Cloudflare just block many websites' access from here. I can't access some sites just because I'm from an IP range from Turkey. I can jump onto my VPN, but still, not convenient.
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