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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

#291

Post by fuzzy_biscuit »

jaredhallen wrote: post #113
immibis wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider it as getting 10x the resources for the same price - that is, the resource-to-price ratio is 10x. Except you don't need 10x the resources so you choose to get 1x the resources for 0.1x the price instead.

Sure. Getting 10x the resources for the same price is another valid way to express the thought. Saving 10x isn't, though.

I think you would be more accurate to say 'communicate the thought' as opposed to 'express the thought'. Communication carries the explicit desire to have an idea be shared. Expression carries no shared understanding and is personal.

The author expressed the thought in a valid way because we understood their words, but they did not communicate it well because we are confused about their understanding of those ideas.

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

#292

Post by piokoch »

jwr wrote: post #281

This is all correct. I've been running my own servers for many years now, keeping things simple and saving a lot of money and time (setting anything up in AWS or Azure is horribly complicated and the UIs are terrible). One thing to remember is that you do need to treat your servers as "cloud servers" in the sense that you should be able to re-generate your entire setup from your configuration at any time, given a bun…

This is all true. But... But if you manage your own server, as the author advice, you need to figure out a lot of stuff and remember about a lot of stuff.

Are ulimits set correctly?

Shall I turn on syn cookies or turn them off because of performance?

What are the things I should know but I don't and Chat GPT has not told me them, as this is more than some intro tutorial on how to run VPS on DO, so it was never indexed by Chat GPT and alikes.

Is all of my software on the server up to date? Is there any library I use exploited, zero day attacks are on me too, blocking bots, etc. What if I do some update but it will turn out that my Postgres version is not working correctly anymore? This is all my problem.

What if I need to send emails? These days doing this ourselves is a dark art by itself (IP/domain address warming up, checking if my domain has not ended on some spam list, etc.).

What if I need to follow some regulations, like European Union GDPR compliance? Have I done everything what is needed to store personal data as GDPR requires? Is my DB password stored in a compliant way or I will face a fine up to 10% of my incomes.

This is not black/white situation as the author tries to present and those who use cloud services are not dumbards who are buying some IT version of snake oil.

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

#293

Post by matt-p »

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 mean there are many places that sell multi AZ, hourly billed VPS/Bare Metal/GPU at a fraction of the cost of AWS.

I would personally have an account at one of those places and back up to there with everything ready to spin up instances and failover if you lose your rack, and use them for any bursty loads.

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

#295

Post by matt-p »

fhd2 wrote: post #201
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…

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…

One way of solving for this is to just use K3s or even just plain docker. It is then just kuberneters/containers and you can hire alot of people who understand that.

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

#296

Post by zelphirkalt »

throwaway106382 wrote: post #167

Basically it boils down to: Is your time worth more than what the fully managed services on AWS cost? And I mean that quite literally in the sense of your billable hours. If you like spending time tinkering with manually configuring linux servers, and don't have anything else that generates better value for you to do - by all means go for it. For small pet projects with no customers, a cheap Hetzner box is probably f…

Well, this sounds wildly out of touch. Companies using Hetzner cloud or servers having thousands of customers and paying 50-100 people are running just fine, but you labeled them a "small pet project". Provisioning new servers works just fine via API when you need it.

Source: I worked at such a company.

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

#297

Post by 8fingerlouie »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #268
sundache wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 day…

Also the GP take is kinda silly, because one pays 5-10x with the typical cloud providers in the first place, so it would be totally fine to pay that and already have it, if one is willing to spend that much. More likely load will spread over time for most scenarios and the server will be ready to handle that with lower hardware specs.

There's a reason i specifically mentioned finance, where the end and start of a month is a lot more busy than the middle of the month, as in factor 10+.

People receive paychecks, pay bills, buy stuff, with holidays (christmas, x-mas, etc) being even busier.

Load does not even out, and when you have 3 million customers or more, the load is not really insignificant. Nor can you just delay it, or rely on eventual consistency.

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

#298

Post by matt-p »

lars512 wrote: post #294

Hetzner is great if you’re in Europe, is there an equivalent in the US or East Asia?

Not exactly like for like, but if you checkout comparison sites like https://serversearcher.com there are options that come close, like $6 for 4GB/2cores in many US locations.

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

#300

Post by cinntaile »

le-mark wrote: post #287
jwr wrote: post #281

This is all correct. I've been running my own servers for many years now, keeping things simple and saving a lot of money and time (setting anything up in AWS or Azure is horribly complicated and the UIs are terrible). One thing to remember is that you do need to treat your servers as "cloud servers" in the sense that you should be able to re-generate your entire setup from your configuration at any time, given a bun…

Have you written about your app and revenue anywhere we can read about it? Looks interesting.

The only people writing about their revenue are online business influencers.
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