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Self-Hosting Still Pays

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Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#321

Post by wolco2 »

busterarm wrote: post #302
wolco2 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Small startups use junior talent for most services. They are not hiring the best hr team, marketing, sales and development. They don't have unless amount of money. They will pick one or two areas where they have an advantage and hire a strong person or two.

I think we have wildly different expectations of the scale of "small startups". If you can afford to full-time hire an entire hr team, an entire marketing team, an entire sales team and an entire engineering org, then you're able to pay an AWS bill.

Maybe not after paying that team.

Small startups have less than 2 million and usually a 16-24 cash or bust cycle. If they are hiring teams of people they are not a small startup.

If you are not bring in more cash than your aws bill that's a problem.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#322

Post by smarx007 »

busterarm wrote: post #85
Zelphyr wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds to me like you're describing a corporate environment with all the bureaucracy that comes with such an environment. That scenario likely has the traffic and revenue to justify a full AWS build out. I'm talking about new projects at much smaller companies, or much smaller departments within the company that don't yet know if the product they're building is going to even work. Not to mention; I have the same f…

If you know how to build in AWS cost-effectively (and really to cost-effectively use compute in general), I would still pick cloud over buying any hardware. For my last gig I was hosting the web infrastructure for a 5B/yr enterprise with a low-5 digit Alexa Rank on roughly $100/mo in EC2 instances. That was after converting the property to a static site built with jekyll (you can do pretty amazing, magical-looking th…

I am not sure how can you host something serious in just $100/mo on AWS: m5.large w/25GB SSD costs $75/mo, 1TB traffic costs $90. DigitalOcean asks $60 for this (2 vCPU; 8GB RAM) and includes 4TB of traffic out of the box for the reference, Hetzner asks €25. Note that even a second host for a DBMS is not included in this, let alone DBMS with replication. You will also have to host Redis (or alternative) on its own server if you need to scale your frontend beyond one server. Either I am seriously missing something or our definition of serious/prod env differs quite a lot.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#323

Post by taylodl »

candiodari wrote: post #82
WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, AWS isn't for a smaller company. When you have a real finance department that vets each third party or have some governmental requirement to get three quotes for each new service (part of requirements set out to minimize grift in sourcing), having a single bill that can be expanded to include new projects and services makes it a little simple. This causes a problem during cost cutting because unless it's a prio…

And yet, AWS isn't for a really larger company either. At some point the bills become so huge that running your own IT and datacenters is cheaper. Usually a lot. Even when it means building some AWS services yourself. https://www.bmc.com/blogs/dropbox-aws/

Worker at Fortune 200 company here having multiple datacenters and the operations staff to go with that. So far, every single application we've ported over to AWS has resulted in reduced costs. I'm not even talking about total costs, i.e. datacenter power costs, real estate taxes, staffing costs - I'm only talking about server costs, networking costs, storage costs and software licensing costs. So far AWS has beat on-premise every single time. Is it cheap? Compared to running on-premise Hell Yeah! Our average savings has been 60% (and like I said we're not even looking at total cost, so the actual average savings is even higher). It's ridiculous.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#324

Post by ocdtrekkie »

fomine3 wrote: post #304
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you bundle Exchange + CALs + Office Professional Plus, over a three-year version upgrade cycle, versus three years of Office 365, Office 365 costs about twice as much, last I checked. And, since Microsoft supports it's software for ten years, you can skip one or two versions of Exchange/Office and still get security updates, and pay a quarter or a sixth of what it costs to go with Office 365.

For comparing email service, cloud services are superior for spam reputation because they are big.

Sure, but the problem with this is often overblown. If I was going to send mass mail, I might prefer to use an outside service like Sendgrid or Constant Contact to avoid that risk, but for general email, it isn't a big deal to operate your own on-premise server.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#325

Post by smarx007 »

busterarm wrote: post #256
chmod775 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Running my site on dedicated servers costs me $500 a month, running it on AWS would cost me about $20,000 a month (probably just for the egress traffic alone). I could hire four system administrators for that money to look after each of my four dedicated servers full time. On top of that you first need to learn AWS. That thing is complicated - but I can set up a dedicated server in minutes because it's indistinguisha…

How much of that egress traffic would be saved by using a CDN?

Can you please explain how would this reduce cost? 1TB of egress on EC2 is $90 and on CloudFront is $85. Or are you suggesting to use something like BunnyCDN with $5/TB instead of AWS services?

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#326

Post by User23 »

busterarm wrote: post #303
rualca wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Amazon itself used to be that environment. Before AWS was adopted internally, which it wasn't for some time, to say nothing of the many years before it was created, getting capacity involved a weeks or even months long political game with the infrastructure team. It's my understanding that you're describing how Amazon worked in the 90s. It's my understanding that Amazon afterwards moved to an internal cloud provide…

> It's my understanding that you're describing how Amazon worked in the 90s. It's my understanding that Amazon afterwards moved to an internal cloud provider, and afterwards spun off AWS which worked in parallel with Amazon's internal cloud provider. Not at all. Amazon's transformation took years. Up until last year, amazon.com was Oracle's biggest customer. AWS development far outpaced their actual use of it.

The website platform itself started migrating to AWS, in a crude but reasonably effective way, in 2009. Various other service owners migrated sooner though.

Also there had already long been a directive to build services as though they were going to be used by external customers since the early 2000s. It's not wrong to view AWS as just another step in Amazon's long services journey, although that elides many significant events.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#327

Post by sokoloff »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #324
fomine3 wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For comparing email service, cloud services are superior for spam reputation because they are big.

Sure, but the problem with this is often overblown. If I was going to send mass mail, I might prefer to use an outside service like Sendgrid or Constant Contact to avoid that risk, but for general email, it isn't a big deal to operate your own on-premise server.

I run my own email domain for my family. We have DKIM and SPF setup. We've been on a clean, constant IP for 5+ years. We still have deliverability problems that I don't have from O365 (work) or gmail. We probably have even more than we detect, because these are typically invisible until you can "discover the absence of a signal".

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#328

Post by anonfornoreason »

kroolik wrote: post #301
anonfornoreason wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a startup/business/tech forum, I am a founder of a 20 person business (hiring 7 more) that does this part-time because it's very low maintenance. I am finally hiring a devops person to handle the command line side of things, though I am still pretty happy to dink around at the datacenter every once in a while. I taught myself as I went. I save about 10x over AWS. I would likely make the same decision today if…

I'm glad you've taught yourself infra things as you needed. But, you see, this is an anecdotal proof (like the whole article, anyway). Learning infra is not the case all the time. Some companies choose AWS (or any other) for speed. We can, again, argue but the argument is my PoV vs yours, or any other new commenter. Although I know how to maintain small infra: bunch of vms, reverse proxy and an rdbms, I'm not really…

If your team cannot manage a postgres, rabbitmq, etc install, then you need to find higher caliber employees.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#329

Post by kroolik »

anonfornoreason wrote: post #328
kroolik wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad you've taught yourself infra things as you needed. But, you see, this is an anecdotal proof (like the whole article, anyway). Learning infra is not the case all the time. Some companies choose AWS (or any other) for speed. We can, again, argue but the argument is my PoV vs yours, or any other new commenter. Although I know how to maintain small infra: bunch of vms, reverse proxy and an rdbms, I'm not really…

If your team cannot manage a postgres, rabbitmq, etc install, then you need to find higher caliber employees.

You would rather have a team of specialists for every piece of technology you have. I'd rather have my team members not focus on nuissances of database replication, and instead solve our customers' problems.

Looks like both of us are successful. Why does it have to be that there is only one way to success?

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#330

Post by kroolik »

mekster wrote: post #154
kroolik wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You and people posting similar answers miss a very important point. You've mentioned you have over 10 years of experience managing rack servers. That's super great! This means a company that hires you does not need to use AWS for some of the services, because you've got the necessary expertise to do it yourself. Other companies buy this expertise via fully managed services, like S3 or Aurora. Once you have expertise…

Why pay premium when there are cheaper cloud alternatives? Just get your team to learn a thing or two than being sold by AWS. I'd take it most people just feel enthusiastic about technologies they don't even need and being able to run stuff with mouse clicks makes them feel accomplishing. To me, AWS is just an expensive provider that only makes sense to put backup files because of cheap storage and no incoming bandwi…

Your post contains two distinctive arguments: paying premium for managed services instead of learning a thing or two, and paying AWS for their services.

Re first argument: I don't know how to implement DDoS protection, neither is my company a DDoS protection shop. Should I learn how to do it myself, or pay CloudFlare to do it for me? What about S3? What about Aurora/Dynamo/SQS? Where is the line between "your company TOTALLY has to do it on its own" vs "pay the people who know how to run X to run it for you"?

Regarding AWS prices: it's not like you are forced to use AWS. Use the cloud your team is most familiar with. I'm not an expert on cloud offerings, yet if your problem is $20k/month and $15k/month infrastracture costs, you might be solving a wrong problem.

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