Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 indexe…
Setting up the email server is the only thing I couldn't do with my own home hosted setup because you're at the mercy of your internet provider to give you the PTR record in their network, and lately many providers outright refuse to do it for "your own and their own safety" reasons. This thing alone could be the difference between deciding to host yourself or use a cloud service.
I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars
321–330 of 406 posts
Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars
#322The irony is that I went to read this article and encountered the Cloudflare error "521: Web server is down".
Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars
#323The irony is that I went to read this article and encountered the Cloudflare error "521: Web server is down".
Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
The most consistent misunderstanding I see about the cloud, is disk I/O. Nobody understands how slow your standard cloud disk is under load. They see good performance and assume that will always be the case. They don't realize that most cloud disks use a form of token tracking where they build up I/O over time and if you have bursts or sustained high I/O load you will very quickly notice that your disk speeds are gar…
What could I read to inform myself better on this topic? It is true I had not seen this angle before
I/O is hard to benchmark so it's often ignored since you can just scale up your disks. It's a common gotcha in the cloud. It's not a show stopper, but it blows up the savings you might be expecting.
Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
The most consistent misunderstanding I see about the cloud, is disk I/O. Nobody understands how slow your standard cloud disk is under load. They see good performance and assume that will always be the case. They don't realize that most cloud disks use a form of token tracking where they build up I/O over time and if you have bursts or sustained high I/O load you will very quickly notice that your disk speeds are gar…
Even without that, you are still at the heart of it accessing over a SAN like interface with some sort of local cache. Getting an actual local drive on AWS the performance is night and day
Also, SAN is often faster then local disk if you have a local SAN.
Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
This needs some context. I can think of several cases where this wouldn’t be the be right.
Big box VM host running several VMs, hardware starts to fail, brings the entire setup to its knees. That wouldn't happen if you had each VM running on its own physical hardware, unless the UPS/PDU died...
Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars
#327Earlier 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…
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
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 consis…
But most hosting providers allow you to just rent a server for a day or a few hours, so it's not really an argument why you have to use the cloud.
Finance is a heavily regulated industry, so there’s a LOT of compliance that needs to happen, like segregation of duty, traceability, accountability, and other ilities.
Yes, it would probably cost less to run on Hetzner (provided their ISO audits are approved by financial authorities), but dynamically spinning up and down servers would cost more.
You also need fallback plans (regulated industry, critical infrastructure, etc).
It has literally taken years to get AWS and Azure approved in EU.
Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
Big box VM host running several VMs, hardware starts to fail, brings the entire setup to its knees. That wouldn't happen if you had each VM running on its own physical hardware, unless the UPS/PDU died...
VMs are able to live migrate these days. Single VM has a lot more uptime guarantee than a distributed system with multiple over the network communication layers.
Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
Setting up the email server is the only thing I couldn't do with my own home hosted setup because you're at the mercy of your internet provider to give you the PTR record in their network, and lately many providers outright refuse to do it for "your own and their own safety" reasons. This thing alone could be the difference between deciding to host yourself or use a cloud service.
Just use the Postmark web service API, cheap, reliable, and far more if one really wants to lean into email with their online service. https://postmarkapp.com/email-api