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Self-Hosting Still Pays

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Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#281

Post by cutler »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #185
cutler wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That Rails app might just be the next Stripe, Shopify or AirBnB.

I’m not sure what point you’re making exactly, but Stripe and AirBnB (not sure about Shopify) are all on AWS. > A year after Airbnb launched, the company decided to migrate nearly all of its cloud computing functions to Amazon Web Services (AWS) because of service administration challenges experienced with its original provider. Nathan Blecharczyk, Co-founder & CTO of Airbnb says, “Initially, the appeal of AWS was th…

I was referring more to the throw-away reference to Rails apps being small potatoes.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#282

Post by lmm »

Baeocystin wrote: post #278
jariel wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Is it dirt-simple to admin," Often it's not though. It's a pain to admin for someone who knows nothing about it, and it's also a pain to have to do anything at all! The power of the cloud for smaller shops is that the don't have to know what Synology is, or even give it a thought. That you click point-click and set up an EC2 with some S3 and get rid of most admin knowledge/know-how is like magic. That's the best rea…

The (vast) majority of small businesses are not out to grow as fast as possible, seeking that big money valley exit. Most are family operations that seek to stay at whatever size that might encompass. FWIW.

Even for that kind of small-scale business: what happens when that server has hardware trouble? Are they testing their backups regularly? Something like Heroku might cost them much more in an average month, but it eliminates a huge range of worst case scenarios.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#283

Post by jariel »

Baeocystin wrote: post #278
jariel wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Is it dirt-simple to admin," Often it's not though. It's a pain to admin for someone who knows nothing about it, and it's also a pain to have to do anything at all! The power of the cloud for smaller shops is that the don't have to know what Synology is, or even give it a thought. That you click point-click and set up an EC2 with some S3 and get rid of most admin knowledge/know-how is like magic. That's the best rea…

The (vast) majority of small businesses are not out to grow as fast as possible, seeking that big money valley exit. Most are family operations that seek to stay at whatever size that might encompass. FWIW.

"The (vast) majority of small businesses are not out to grow as fast as possible, seeking that big money valley exit. "

This is nothing to do with what I said though.

A 'mom and pop shop' that isn't doing product, and only needs IT, may still likely be very well served by the cloud because they probably only need a few EC2s and some minor services and frankly that's very cheap relatively speaking.

'Expertise' is quite expensive, and doesn't come into value unless there is some scale in place - I don't mean 'millions of users' but a company that has 'Mom and Pop Shops' want to know what a 'rack' is about as much as they want to know what a 'filter' is for their engine. The idea is to get rid of all of that overhead.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#284

Post by manquer »

shiftpgdn wrote: post #15
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…

Do you actually use AWS or are you just parroting something you've read? Do you understand that with AWS you still have to setup instances, manage security updates, permission and deal with disaster response (US-East-1 outage?) If you've run anything at any scale for any length of time you'll know that EC2 hosts frequently get rebooted with short notice.

EC2 is hardly the main service that people decide over. EKS, ECS, Fargate and Lamba, Aurora and other managed DBs, S3 eliminates a lot of the setup skills and time required to setup something even remotely reliable and on par in features. Sure if you need a reliable VM there are cheaper options perhaps.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#285

Post by twothamendment »

It all depends on the scale of not only the app, but the organization too. We have enough people to click buttons in RDS. We don't have enough to mess around with replication, backups, etc. The cost isn't just for the hardware, but the services that we'd otherwise have to hire someone to do.

I used to work at a place that would borrow hardware from one client in order to handle the load on another. It was for seasonal stuff, a few days a year when we knew someone would melt down if they didn't have double or triple the capacity, but they didn't need it the rest of the year.

Now I deal in auto scale groups and don't care how many servers we use or need as long as it isn't wasteful. "Hardware" that isn't ours is so easy to swap out, try a different size or scale that is hate to go back to metal.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#286

Post by rubatuga »

trianglem wrote: post #182
chmod775 wrote: post #146

I mean yeah, AWS is a 10-100x markup over running your own stuff. I run a file hosting site that serves >500TB of data to about 2 million monthly users on a bunch of dedicated servers that cost me about $500 a month. If I ran this on AWS it would cost me more than $20,000 every month . I could hire four system administrators to do nothing but look after each of my four dedicated servers for that money. It's completel…

Same. I’ve been in places that self host and it’s not nearly enough to overcome what AWS (in my case Azure) charge. 99.5% uptime in contracts lets you realistically have a lot of downtime to fix your problems. That’s more than 400 hours of acceptable downtime. We’re in the process of making the switch and we project to pay 30% of what we’re currently paying.

There's not even 44 hours of downtime in a year for 99.5% SLA, so I have no idea what you are talking about.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#287

Post by Baeocystin »

lmm wrote: post #282
Baeocystin wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The (vast) majority of small businesses are not out to grow as fast as possible, seeking that big money valley exit. Most are family operations that seek to stay at whatever size that might encompass. FWIW.

Even for that kind of small-scale business: what happens when that server has hardware trouble? Are they testing their backups regularly? Something like Heroku might cost them much more in an average month, but it eliminates a huge range of worst case scenarios.

They have a contract with an IT professional to handle that sort of thing for them, same as they would have a contract with someone who uses Heroku or Amazon to fill their IT needs if they were using those servers instead.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#288

Post by Baeocystin »

jariel wrote: post #283
Baeocystin wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The (vast) majority of small businesses are not out to grow as fast as possible, seeking that big money valley exit. Most are family operations that seek to stay at whatever size that might encompass. FWIW.

"The (vast) majority of small businesses are not out to grow as fast as possible, seeking that big money valley exit. " This is nothing to do with what I said though. A 'mom and pop shop' that isn't doing product, and only needs IT, may still likely be very well served by the cloud because they probably only need a few EC2s and some minor services and frankly that's very cheap relatively speaking. 'Expertise' is quit…

>for IT there's no reason they can't be fully cloud.

Without even taking other aspects in to account, I think you overestimate the availability, reliability, and speed of internet connections for much of the country.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#289

Post by HideousKojima »

dheera wrote: post #194
tpxl wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>With AWS or any other IaaS provider you're paying to outsource shifts of people around the clock that will work to keep servers and network connections up and running. This is so often repeated, but at my previous company, the amount of internal outages was smaller than the amount of outages on AWS or GCP. We then migrated to AWS for some stupid reason (we didn't need scalability, that's for sure) and we had a probl…

That's great, but when you're a startup and your only option is Comcast, outages are a very real thing. Our first real office also had internet access run by these 2 dudes in the basement and outages every few weeks for a couple hours.

>That's great, but when you're a startup and your only option is Comcast, outages are a very real thing.

Then send your hardware to a colo for a fraction of the cost of AWS

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#290

Post by rualca »

busterarm wrote: post #51
Zelphyr wrote: post #8

I see so often developers state something along the lines of, "We need to go with AWS!" (sometimes substituting AWS with GCP or Azure) and the reason they always give is "scalability". 99% of the time, what they're building not only doesn't need to scale to that degree but they somehow seem to think that it's always inherently cheaper. Meanwhile, when I build something for a client my first go-to is something like Di…

Scalability itself isn't the selling point. It's freedom. It's the freedom to get things wrong, iterate and try again. It's the freedom to move resources around. It's the freedom of not having to wait for your procurement process and approval from a purchasing department. It's the freedom of not having to wait for your operations team to plug in and configure bare metal. And all of these freedoms have compounding int…

> It's the freedom to get things wrong, iterate and try again. It's the freedom to move resources around. It's the freedom of not having to wait for your procurement process and approval from a purchasing department. It's the freedom of not having to wait for your operations team to plug in and configure bare metal.

I don't understand your point. How is any random cloud provider, or even hosting company, a blocker to moving resources around or wait for procurement or to iterate?

I'm looking at the Hetzner cloud dashboard and I'm free to launch how many instances I need at the drop of a hat.

In the end there's an itemized bill, which unlike AWS you pay only for what you ordered up front and you can reason about without having to endure advance courses or freaking machine learning tools.

Where exactly are you seeing any freedom at all on AWS?

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