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I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

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Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#241

Post by mootothemax »

busterarm wrote: post #134
koito17 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On this site, I've seen these kind of takes repeatedly over the past years, so I went ahead and built a little forum that consists of a single Rust binary and SQLite. The binary runs on a Mac Mini in my bedroom with Cloudflare tunnels. I get continuous backups with Litestream, and testing backups is as trivial as running `litestream restore` on my development machine and then running the binary. Despite some pages is…

Just one of the couple dozen databases we run for our product in the dev environment alone is over 12 TB. How could I not use the cloud?

> Just one of the couple dozen databases we run for our product in the dev environment alone is over 12 TB.

> How could I not use the cloud?

Funnily enough, one of my side projects has its (processed) primary source of truth at that exact size. Updates itself automatically every night adding a further ~18-25 million rows. Big but not _big_ data, right?

Anyway, that's sitting running happily with instant access times (yay solid DB background) on a dedicated OVH server that's somewhere around £600/mo (+VAT) and shared with a few other projects. OVH's virtual rack tech is pretty amazing too, replicating that kind of size on the internal network is trivial too.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#243

Post by franciscop »

ascorbic wrote: post #207
0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Careful what you wish for. Netlify sent a guy a $104k bill from the free plan. Thankfully social media outage saved the guy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39520776

Netlify changed their pricing after that so that free accounts are always free.

Could you give a reference please? I was literally going to recommend Netlify at work, but didn't after I saw that story.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#245

Post by mcny »

c0balt wrote: post #189
selcuka wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> one of the couple dozen databases I guess this is one of those use cases that justify the cloud. It's hard to host that reliably at home.

Not too push the point too hard, but a "dev environment" for a product is for a business (not an individual consumer). Having a server (rack) in an office is not that hard, but alas the cloud might be better here for ease of administration.

My understanding is that aws exists because we can't get any purchase approved in under three months.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#246

Post by sundache »

8fingerlouie wrote: post #227
mrweasel wrote: post #221

While I love a good cloud bashing, it's really not black and white. If you're really small, it probably doesn't matter much if you're using Hetzner or AWS, but co-location might be a bit to expensive. If you run an absolutely massive company, cloud vs. self-hosted comes down to whether or not you can build tooling as good as AWS, GCP or Azure, with all the billing infrastructure and reporting. The issues are mostly i…

If you have high volume traffic depending on time of month, ie finance around ultimo/primo, you might need to scale your performance to 5-10x your normal idle load. If running on your own data center, or renting physical/virtual machines from ie Hetzner, you will pay for that capability overhead for 30.5 days per month, when in reality you only need it for 2-3 days. With the cloud you can simply scale dynamically, an…

> If running on your own data center, or renting physical/virtual machines from ie Hetzner, you will pay for that capability overhead for 30.5 days per month, when in reality you only need it for 2-3 days.

I keep seeing this take on here and it just shows most people don't actually know what you can do off the cloud. Hertzner allows you to rent servers by the hour, so you can just do that and only pay for the 2-3 days you need them.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#247

Post by wongarsu »

c0balt wrote: post #189
selcuka wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> one of the couple dozen databases I guess this is one of those use cases that justify the cloud. It's hard to host that reliably at home.

Not too push the point too hard, but a "dev environment" for a product is for a business (not an individual consumer). Having a server (rack) in an office is not that hard, but alas the cloud might be better here for ease of administration.

And plenty of datacenters will be happy to give you some space in one of their racks.

Not wanting to deal with backups or HA are decent reasons to put a database in the cloud (as long as you are aware how much you are overpaying). Not having a good place to put the server is not a good reason

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#248

Post by themafia »

> You’ve been scammed, likely not out of your own money, but your employer’s money – and that’s why you don’t give a crap.

No, I've ran the numbers, and in doing so, realized that EC2 is the wrong solution for most problems. If you use the correct solution the price is highly competitive with your servers. One of the reasons being, I do not need to maintain servers.. I did that for 25 years and I absolutely hate it. The amount of time I save, which my company pays for, is ridiculous. I get a powerful security model, a unified API for managing everything, and expertly managed runtimes.

You're acting as if people only making $4k/mo in salary are making these decisions. You've got startup brain. Come back down to earth and reassess your position.

> you’re looking to save for the long run. Well, turns out buying your own servers is even cheaper in a long enough time frame

Yet another process I don't have to waste time on. "Capital purchasing" is extremely annoying (by design) in every single organization I've ever worked for or consulted with.

Like most "cloud cost analysis" this is extremely shallow and is apparently based upon the supposed "virality" of a single tweet.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#249

Post by [deleted] »

koito17 wrote: post #120
John23832 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't actually need any of those things until you no longer have a "project", but a business which will allow you to pay for the things you require. You'd be amazed by how far you can get with a home linux box and cloudflare tunnels.

On this site, I've seen these kind of takes repeatedly over the past years, so I went ahead and built a little forum that consists of a single Rust binary and SQLite. The binary runs on a Mac Mini in my bedroom with Cloudflare tunnels. I get continuous backups with Litestream, and testing backups is as trivial as running `litestream restore` on my development machine and then running the binary. Despite some pages is…

[deleted]

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#250

Post by kkapelon »

charlieflowers wrote: post #31
stevage wrote: post #8

The first couple of paragraphs of price comparisons are useful. Then there are many paragraphs of sheer waffle. The author doesn't even seem able to define what "the cloud" is: > The whole debate of “is this still the cloud or not” is nonsense to me. You’re just getting lost in naming conventions. VPS, bare metal, on-prem, colo, who cares what you call it. You need to put your servers somewhere. Sure, have a computer…

I read the whole thing and I didn't see any waffle. Sure, undeniably some excess word count, some emotion in responding to critics. But no waffle. The "is this cloud or not" debate in the piece makes perfect sense. Who cares whether Hetzner is defined as "the cloud" or not? The point is, he left AWS without going to Azure or some other obvious cloud vendor. He took a step towards more hands on management. And he save…

> He took a step towards more hands on management. And he saved a ton of money.

Then the article should be titled as

"Send this article to your friend who still thinks that AWS is a good idea"

or

"Save costs by taking a step towards more hands on management"

or

"How I saved money moving from AWS to Hetzner"

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