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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

#351

Post by jimbokun »

vijucat wrote: post #237

I took care of IT for a startup hedge fund once. I was the quant's right-hand man, data engineer, visualization dashboard guy, everything. The quant needed to run a monolithic C++ program daily to chew through stock data and we decided a dual-Xeon server with 512 GB RAM would be great. OVH MG-512, for those curious. Quant happy, boss happy, all good. Then the boss goes for lunch with someone and comes back slightly d…

I would think a quant would understand arithmetic.

Did you try crunching some of the numbers with him? I would hope a quant could also understand following the common wisdom can sometimes cost you more.

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

#352

Post by jwr »

brandall10 wrote: post #346
jwr wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems to be quite true, as people who run a successful and enjoyable business are busy running their successful and enjoyable business :-)

"Building in public" is a reasonable marketing tactic, I wouldn't discount it entirely.

Marketing tactics only work if they reach your customers, and HN readers are generally not my customers.

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

#353

Post by 1dom »

kelnos wrote: post #43
Atreiden wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Homelab =/= Production systems The gulf between these two insofar as what approach, technologies, and due-diligences are necessary is vast.

I think we've gone a little nuts defining "production system" these days. I've worked for companies with zero-downtime deployments and quite a lot of redundancy for high availability, and for some applications it's definitely worthwhile. But I think for many (most?) businesses, one nine is just fine. That's perfectly doable by one person, even if you want, say, >=96% uptime, which allows for 350 hours of downtime per…

I agree. "production system" isn't a useful term without context.

Either it's production system in the context of "it's a business serving customers", in which case, there are many homelabs out there which have received paying traffic, or it's a production system in terms of functionality, downtime, technical features etc. Again, there are many homelabs out there that can tick all the same technical and performance boxes as "production system".

In the context of the original comment I was responding to ("...running and managing numerous DBs, k8s clusters, ci/cd pipelines and stateless container systems is simply impossible with a team of 1-2 people.") you're more evidence for my comment that it's perfectly possible for 1 - 2 people to run a small production system, just as it's possible for 1 nerd to run a medium - large homelab with the same technical features.

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

#354

Post by bobdvb »

ksec wrote: post #270
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…

>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: When did Linode and DO got dropped and not being part of the cloud ? What used to separate VPS and Cloud was resources at per second billing. Which DO and Linode along with a lot of…

For a lot of people (not me), if it's not from AWS, Azure, GCP or Oracle then it's not cloud, it's just a sparkling hosting provider.

I had someone on this site arguing that Cloudflare isn't a cloud provider...

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

#355

Post by ttkciar »

piokoch wrote: post #292
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 indexe…

Yes, you will need to employ someone with basic system administration competence. That's a given.

Cloud infra is touted as obviating the need to hire system administrators, but that's a marketing fabrication. Trying to manage infrastructure without the necessary in-house skills is a recipe for disaster, whether it's in the cloud or on-prem.

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

#356

Post by brandall10 »

jwr wrote: post #352
brandall10 wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Building in public" is a reasonable marketing tactic, I wouldn't discount it entirely.

Marketing tactics only work if they reach your customers, and HN readers are generally not my customers.

I was addressing the "people who run a successful and enjoyable business" comment, not you specifically.

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

#359

Post by EGreg »

graemep wrote: post #279
foldr wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It became much more expensive than AWS, because it bundled the hard drive space with the RAM. Couldn't scale one without scaling the other. It was ridiculous. You can easily scale hard drive space independently of RAM by buying block storage separately and then mounting it on your Linode.

I think every VPS provider I have looked at any time recently (and I have been moving things in the last few weeks) offers some option for block storage separate from compute. Most offer an object storage option too.

Not back then
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