Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

rameerez.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 406 posts

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

#251

Post by fhd2 »

makeitdouble wrote: post #236
fhd2 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My pet peeves are: 1. For small stuff, AWS et al aren't that much more expensive than Hetzner, mostly in the same ballpark, maybe 2x in my experience. 2. What's easy to underestimate for _developers_ is that your self hosted setup is most likely harder to get third party support for. If you run software on AWS, you can hire someone familiar with AWS and as long as you're not doing anything too weird, they'll figure i…

> 2. What's easy to underestimate for _developers_ is that your self hosted setup is most likely harder to get third party support for. If you run software on AWS, you can hire someone familiar with AWS and as long as you're not doing anything too weird, they'll figure it out and modify it in no time. If you're at an early/smaller stage you're not doing anything too fancy either way. Even self hosted, it will probabl…

You'd think that, but from what I've seen, some people come up with pretty nasty self hosting setups. All the way from "just manually set it all up via SSH last year" to Kubernetes. Of course, people can and also definitely do create a mess on AWS. It's just that I've seen that _far_ less.

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

#252

Post by ROOFLES »

t_mann wrote: post #224

In principle, you don't even need a "server", ie purpose-built hardware like what he's showing. An old laptop will be fine for many projects, although I'd be interested if someone can help put a perspective on how to decide whether your specific project/load will be too much for your specific hardware. My bigger concern with 'true' self-hosting would be how to get a good/reliable enough internet connection.

Our infra runs on 2 12-Year old shitbox Poweredges. so yeah most is just overkill.

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

#253

Post by dragonelite »

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?

Sounds more like your use case is like the 1~2% of the cases a simple server and sqlite is maybe not the correct answer.

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

#254

Post by kryptiskt »

selectively wrote: post #3

Idiotic piece - the purpose of 'the cloud' is to scale large demand applications. Rental hardware can't really do that.

I once worked at a bookmaker with millions of customers where they had extreme reliability demands during very popular events, since any bets that the punters couldn't place during live betting was lost money. They had one massive server with a big pipe and an identical hot spare in another location. It worked very well for them. That was a decade ago, you can get even bigger servers these days, there's a lot of room for scaling without needing to go beyond one machine.

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

#255

Post by time4tea »

Its true that aws is very expensive for a lot of use cases, as long as you only count the cost of the servers.

However, in most (every?) large organisations, buying a server and putting it in a DC, and looking after it, is hugely time-consuming, lengthy and expensive.

You need to get quotes, approvals, purchase, rack, commission, maintain etc etc. It is usually close to 1 year to get a server.

In some companies, even getting a virtual server takes almost as long!

With AWS, once an account and service is approved, boom, you are done.

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

#256

Post by foldr »

EGreg wrote: post #137
Sebb767 wrote: post #16

I dislike those black and white takes a lot. It's absolutely true that most startups that just run an EC2 instance will save a lot of cash going to Hetzner, Linode, Digital Ocean or whatever. I do host at Hetzner myself and so do a lot of my clients. That being said, the cloud does have a lot of advantages: - You're getting a lot of services readily available. Need offsite backups? A few clicks. Managed database? A f…

I started out with linode, a decade ago. It became much more expensive than AWS, because it bundled the hard drive space with the RAM. Couldn't scale one without scaling the other. It was ridiculous. AWS has a bunch of startup credits you can use, if you're smart. But if you want free hosting, nothing beats just CloudFlare. They are literally free and even let you sign up anonymously with any email. They don't even r…

>It became much more expensive than AWS, because it bundled the hard drive space with the RAM. Couldn't scale one without scaling the other. It was ridiculous.

You can easily scale hard drive space independently of RAM by buying block storage separately and then mounting it on your Linode.

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

#257

Post by mythz »

We've moved to Hetzner several years ago, and the savings will ensure we'll likely never consider the Cloud again (Exception is Cloudflare Workers, which is well done with generous quotas). Although it would be way easier to move now since automation, deployment, backup and retention scripts are much faster to write now with AI.

BTW in-case you've missed it [1] Anthropic is offering $250 free credits till Nov 18 for their new Claude Code on the Web [2] for Clause Pro/Max users.

[1] https://x.com/adocomplete/status/1985766988724244839

[2] https://claude.ai/code

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

#258

Post by hosh »

time4tea wrote: post #255

Its true that aws is very expensive for a lot of use cases, as long as you only count the cost of the servers. However, in most (every?) large organisations, buying a server and putting it in a DC, and looking after it, is hugely time-consuming, lengthy and expensive. You need to get quotes, approvals, purchase, rack, commission, maintain etc etc. It is usually close to 1 year to get a server. In some companies, even…

The article was talking about solo devs, small businesses, and startups. A few physical servers that can handle millions of request per day.

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

#259

Post by san1t1 »

Love a nice 'single box project'.

But as soon as you start dealing with data sovereignty for your SaaS app, and need co-lo's in multiple geographies, each with their own contract/billing cycles, HA and backup, the global reach and consistency of the cloud providers starts seeming quite compelling again.

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

#260

Post by cyberpunk »

time4tea wrote: post #255

Its true that aws is very expensive for a lot of use cases, as long as you only count the cost of the servers. However, in most (every?) large organisations, buying a server and putting it in a DC, and looking after it, is hugely time-consuming, lengthy and expensive. You need to get quotes, approvals, purchase, rack, commission, maintain etc etc. It is usually close to 1 year to get a server. In some companies, even…

Let’s not forget capex/opex. You can bill an aws project to a project, datacenter costs or shared across the entire org and it’s prohibitively complicated to budget these per project.

Sure you can do it cheaper, but money isn’t really the problem. Most cloud spend is less than the cost of a handful of senior devs a month.

Post reply on HN