331–340 of 406 posts
Engineering is all tradeoffs. For this guy who spent thousands per month on AWS, using AWS makes no sense. For a guy like me whose AWS bill was 38 cents last month, AWS makes a lot of sense. Currently I have a small KaiOS app with about 1000 unique visitors per month hosted on AWS. I used to self-host on an old laptop, but it costs less money to host on AWS (1 kwh cost me 19.89 cents and my laptop uses about 4.5kwh p…
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…
The author touches on it briefly, but I'd argue that the cloud is immensely helpful for building (and tearing down) an MVP or proving an early market for a new company using startup credits or free tiers offered by all vendors. Once a business model has been proven, individual components and the underlying infrastructure can be moved out of the cloud as soon as cost becomes a concern. This means that teams must make…
Seems like nowadays people seem less concerned with vendor lockin than they were 15 years ago. One of the reason to want to avoid lockin is to be able to move when the price gouging gets just a little bit too greedy that the move is worth the cost. One of the drawbacks of all these built in services at AWS is the expense of trying to recreate the architecture elsewhere.
Reading author's article:
> For me, that meant:
> RDS for the PostgreSQL database (my biggest monthly cost, in fact)
> EC2 for the web server (my 2nd biggest monthly cost)
> Elasticache for Redis
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…
All of this is true both for dedicated servers and cloud-hosted VMs. This list looks like FUD, to be honest, trying to scare people. Yes, you should be scared of these things, but none of them are magically solved by hosting your stuff in AWS/Azure/Google or any other could provider du jour.
The blog entry was wordy and repetitive for what it expressed (AI?), but the cloud argument should boil down to a few simple questions:
- Does it get you regulatory certifications you need?
- Do you need to rapidly scale-up / scale-down?
- Can you afford to hire the (minimal) necessary skills to self-administer servers?
- Can you stay on top of security updates?
- Regulated companies who want to punt on certs/attestations
- Small/medium growth-oriented startups (unknown needs, low headcount, focus on building product)
- Companies with hardware demand volatility that exceeds their ability to provision it
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
I am aware of the tons of subscription based email services but that is not the point here. What good is self hosting when you still need to rely on some external paid service for a trivial thing like an email server? The costs add up.
The irony is that I went to read this article and encountered the Cloudflare error "521: Web server is down".
I don't think it was designed to handle the volume of traffic that HN generates.
Then why does anybody use cloudflare?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're falling into the false dichotomy that always comes up with these topics: as if the choice is between the cloud and renting rack space while applying your own thermal paste on the CPUs. In reality, for most people, renting dedicated servers is the goldilocks solution (not colocation with your own hardware). You get an incredible amount of power for a very reasonable price, but you don't need to drive to a datac…
I’d add this. Servers used to be viewed as pets; the system admins spent a lot time on snow flake configurations and managing each one. When we started standing up tens of servers to host the nodes of our app (early 2000s); the simple admin overhead was huge. One thing I have not seen mentioned here was how powerful ansible and similar tools were at simplifying server management. Iirc being able to provision and stan…