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

I got pwned by my cloud costs

troyhunt.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 657 posts

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#281

Post by pcthrowaway »

marcan_42 wrote: post #275
pcthrowaway wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what the alternative is. Run a home server and pay an ISP $$$ for unusually high upload bandwidth/throughput? 99/100 times running it in the cloud is going to be cheaper, easier, and more resilient. Of course, the delayed sticker shock is a problem.. I think Google cloud actually lets you create a budget that turns services off if they go over, so there's a solution here if you run a hobby project that y…

I've variously paid $5-$30 a month for a VPS/dedicated server to host all my random side projects over almost two decades, including websites for other people, email, etc; there's probably two dozen or more sites running on my Hetzner dedicated server, with storage and CPU and RAM to more than spare. And not once had to worry about extra fees or weird billing issues. Bandwidth has grown from 100Mbps to 1Gbps and I've…

And this is a cloud service is it not?

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#282

Post by forty »

jasode wrote: post #274
lpcvoid wrote: 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…

>Can somebody explain to me why I wouldn't just rent a 40 EUR dedicated server from Hetzner [...] , I just don't understand why people use cloud services. This recurring question of "why AWS/Azure instead of Hetzner/OVH ?" keeps happening because people are incorrectly comparing higher-level PaaS to lower-level IaaS without realizing it. PaaS != IaaS are not equivalent. IaaS is not a direct drop-in replacement for Pa…

Yeah, it feels like someone saying "why don't you build your house yourself? Would be much cheaper". This is certainly true, but

- My house is probably going to be build much faster if it's built by professional house builder (even more true for services since it's available immediately)

- I have better things to do than building houses

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#283

Post by marcan_42 »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #281
marcan_42 wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've variously paid $5-$30 a month for a VPS/dedicated server to host all my random side projects over almost two decades, including websites for other people, email, etc; there's probably two dozen or more sites running on my Hetzner dedicated server, with storage and CPU and RAM to more than spare. And not once had to worry about extra fees or weird billing issues. Bandwidth has grown from 100Mbps to 1Gbps and I've…

And this is a cloud service is it not?

A dedicated server isn't usually considered a "cloud" service. It's a physical server allocated to you, with unmetered bandwidth and local disk.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#284

Post by vidarh »

pooper wrote: post #161
dx034 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe renting dedicated servers is often overlooked. You pay someone else to install hardware, ensure network connections and be on-site for hardware swaps etc but still have the maximum degree of flexibility. Even larger companies can work well with that model, traffic also tends to be cheap enough that you can spread across different vendors to avoid lock-in. And in that case, your sysadmins can sit wherever th…

I don't have first hand knowledge but my understanding is large companies have procurement departments and they get over half off sticker price for Azure. My guess is this is why the sticker price needs to be overinflated because people in procurement need to show that they are doing their jobs. Also it is a major pain point getting anything done with IT operations. Like the Oracle database server that half the depar…

It's true there are huge rebates to be had if you're big enough, which is one thing smaller companies should bear in mind when they look at big company X using cloud provider Y as justification for thinking Y must be cheap.

If you're Netflix, cloud is probably not that much more expensive than owning your own servers. Maybe even cheaper. But you're not getting Netflix prices.

But even if you're small fry you should however start regularly talking to your provider and go through a regular cost-cutting exercise and talk to them about how you're looking at provider Z and have been asked to cost out managed servers and on prem options.... You won't need to get very big before that starts paying off.

If your competition is doing this and you're not, and hosting costs starts becoming a big part of your cost base, you won't be able to compete.

Long term I think we're going to see disruption here to the point of startups failing because of competitors copying their idea but being better at driving down hosting costs by not being afraid of going to dedicated hosting or hybrid solutions (hybrids are my favourite - if your stack can be deployed semi-transparently both on dedicated servers and cloud you can go much closer to the wire on your dedicated servers by being prepared to spin up cloud instances to take care of spikes; ironically having the ability to spin up cloud instances makes relying on cloud services even less cost-effective)

I'd also expect to see more "hybrid" cloud offerings with companies offering you operations-as-a-service by giving you a virtual cloud type interface where they don't actually own a cloud service themselves but helps you abstract away cheaper hosting providers. You can already find plenty of people who'll e.g. run Kubernetes setups for you, so taking the step to do more cost-optimization on the backend is natural (and I'm sure there are people who'd do this for you today - if I was still doing contracting I certainly would be offering that - and maybe someone is already wrapping it up as a service offering; I haven't kept up on that market)

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#285

Post by christophilus »

withinboredom wrote: post #223
that_guy_iain wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As far as I am concerned, I just don't understand why people use cloud services. For companies the benefits are the abiltiy to get new servers at a click of a button and get rid of a server. For example, asking the ops team to setup a snapshot of a database for a few hours while I do something is super useful. There is also the ability to use autoscale and other stuff to automagically scale your system to handle tr…

Hetzner dedicated server * 3 + k3s + vnet + longhorn + metallb = basically the cloud. I can snapshot a database disk with a click of a button and restore the snapshot with yet another few clicks. I have 1.5 TB of highly available disk space, 40 cores of full CPU power, 160 GB of RAM, & dynamically provisioned IPs for metallb. For only $130USD a month. For the same price in Azure, I had 6 CPU cores & 8 GB RAM.

The German companies are really nuts. The cost to value ratio is through the roof. I’m a happy Netcup customer, and I honestly don’t know how they do it and make any profit at all.

I wish they’d bring those same prices to some US data centers.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#286

Post by christophilus »

that_guy_iain wrote: post #276
withinboredom wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hetzner dedicated server * 3 + k3s + vnet + longhorn + metallb = basically the cloud. I can snapshot a database disk with a click of a button and restore the snapshot with yet another few clicks. I have 1.5 TB of highly available disk space, 40 cores of full CPU power, 160 GB of RAM, & dynamically provisioned IPs for metallb. For only $130USD a month. For the same price in Azure, I had 6 CPU cores & 8 GB RAM.

You could do that. But let's say need 4x vCPU: 72, Memory (GiB): 144 for 4 hours. Or you need that 12 hours a day but for the rest of the time you need 2 cpu and 4 GiB of memory. You need to handle traffic spikes such as TV traffic. Yes you could self-host a cloud env but you can't scale your resources the way you can with cloud.

I’ve never worked anywhere where that was really necessary. Even when I worked at Microsoft, the services my team built needed to be big scale, high perf, etc… But they would have easily run on a fixed number of beefy machines even at our peak load for a fraction of the cost of Azure.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#287

Post by hkh »

We've been thinking about this for a while, and if there is any way we can catch these types of cost spikes before they happen. We've managed to do it for Terraform resources using an estimation approach, and using a usage file, you can model expected usage-based resources (https://github.com/infracost/infracost/blob/master/infracost...), but this one has got us thinking more about policies.

To be clear - we would not have been able to catch this one right now :'(

Would love to hear thoughts / brainstorm ideas - is there any way we can proactively catch these types of cost spikes?

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#288

Post by pontifier »

Everything can be going fine for a long time, and then cloud costs kill your business.

This happened to Murfie a couple of years ago, and that's why I had to step in to try to fix things. I'm still trying, and there are still challenges, but I won't allow landlords and cloud costs to disrupt things again.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#289

Post by selestify »

tetha wrote: post #264
lpcvoid wrote: 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…

It depends somewhat on the organizational skillset you have, in my opinion. Current workplace is considering a fully self-hosted stack as a unique selling point for the customers and segments we're in. That means, we have storage and linux admins available, as well as tooling and know-how how to run this securely and efficiently. Thus, placing large and often downloaded files on our file stores at hetzner is very muc…

Where is a good place to learn good administrative practices?

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#290

Post by fbrncci »

lpcvoid wrote: 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…

I have a pretty complicated architecture that would cost me about 20-35$ if it was hosted just on Digitalocean or Hetzner. Instead its AWS ...soon to be multicloud, and costs me about 140$/mo (which does vary). But it does allow me to experiment, write long articles and design some fun stuff; about which I blog on my own website. The blog has gotten me both clients on freelance projects and enough "cred" to start on new projects I don't have any resume experience on. That's the only reason that I personally use cloud services (of course, the reasons for SaaS/Enterprise clients are usually more valid than mine).
Post reply on HN