I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars • Hacker News Board

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

#371

Post by t_mann » Wed, Nov 05, 2025, 9:25 PM UTC

ROOFLES wrote: post #252

t_mann wrote: post #224

In principle, you don't even need a "server", ie purpose-built hardware like what he's showing. An old laptop will be fine for many projects, although I'd be interested if someone can help put a perspective on how to decide whether your specific project/load will be too much for your specific hardware. My bigger concern with 'true' self-hosting would be how to get a good/reliable enough internet connection.

Our infra runs on 2 12-Year old shitbox Poweredges. so yeah most is just overkill.

Cool! It's still purpose-built hardware, but cool to hear such stories. Do you use colocation in a data center?

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

#372

Post by bsenftner » Wed, Nov 05, 2025, 9:32 PM UTC

easton wrote: post #365

kevlened wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to get sales the company ended up moving everything into AWS because customers did not trust anything else This is a hidden cost of self-hosting for many in b2b. It's not just convincing management, it's convincing your clients.

That's interesting. Except for $GIGANTIC_CO (like, BofA, or the government), i'd expect a SLA that describes service resiliency and not "well, our service will be up because we're on AWS". Why would you need to disclose your hosting provider? is that really a concern for hosted services (and if it is, why isn't the customer hosting it in their cloud?)

Most customers do not want to host anything if they can prevent it. My employer was selling the servers that host the entire shebang, and most did not want to host them. We'd explain they'd save a lot by hosting and viewing/streaming everything locally, but their IT people were not comfortable, and their execs wanted to see everything on their phones when not at work. We made it all plug and play, and still they wanted to pay 10-20X more for a web service.

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

#373

Post by 0xbadcafebee » Wed, Nov 05, 2025, 9:41 PM UTC

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #366

JSR_FDED wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This needs some context. I can think of several cases where this wouldn’t be the be right.

Here's a basic comparison: Many small boxes Pros: - Cost. Small boxes cost less. Spend less or spend more as needed. If one dies, cheaper to replace. - Efficiency. Scaling *down* saves money when load is low. Can schedule specific loads to specific boxes. - Redundancy. Multiple VMS, OSes, network paths, etc. No single point of failure. - Zero-downtime. Rolling deployments, upgrades means changes with no user impact.…

Dangit, meant "cattle rather than pets" for small box pros

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

#374

Post by tecleandor » Wed, Nov 05, 2025, 9:46 PM UTC

executesorder66 wrote: post #338

halamadrid wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it was designed to handle the volume of traffic that HN generates.

A Cloudflare fronted website can't handle HN frontpage levels of traffic? Then why does anybody use cloudflare?

Probably bad cache headers configuration. Even with Cloudflare in front it could be forwarding every request to the backend if the cache headers are misconfigured...

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

#375

Post by subarctic » Wed, Nov 05, 2025, 10:01 PM UTC

Having my own server in a datacenter would be cool, buy it's hard to imagine having side projects that I'm willingly spending $1400 US/month on AWS for. Right now I'm still using the free tier on most platforms, plus a $14/month database on digital ocean that I'm not even using

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

#376

Post by ugur2nd » Wed, Nov 05, 2025, 10:37 PM UTC

You won't believe it, but I can host 100 websites for a maximum of $100 per year.

It may seem strange to you, but PHP servers work very well.

I think it's worth a try.

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

#377

Post by abrookewood » Wed, Nov 05, 2025, 10:47 PM UTC

pityJuke wrote: post #244

abrookewood wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So .... you DO care then? Or do you mean "I could NOT care less"?

On orders of the late Queen: https://youtube.com/watch?v=om7O0MFkmpw

Thanks - that is perfect.

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

#378

Post by immibis » Wed, Nov 05, 2025, 11:45 PM UTC

franciscop wrote: post #243

ascorbic wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netlify changed their pricing after that so that free accounts are always free.

Could you give a reference please? I was literally going to recommend Netlify at work, but didn't after I saw that story.

Is $0.55/GB not enough reason to avoid them? I guess not if your business is making more than that - bandwidth expense for a shopping site shouldn't be a problem when the customers are spending $100 for every 0.1GB - but that price should realistically be closer to $0.01/GB or even $0.002/GB. Sounds like they're forwarding you AWS's extremely excessive bandwidth pricing.

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

#379

Post by selcuka » Wed, Nov 05, 2025, 11:46 PM UTC

franciscop wrote: post #243

ascorbic wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netlify changed their pricing after that so that free accounts are always free.

Could you give a reference please? I was literally going to recommend Netlify at work, but didn't after I saw that story.

https://www.netlify.com/pricing/#faq

> The free plan is always free, with hard monthly limits that cannot be exceeded or incur any costs.

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

#380

Post by selcuka » Wed, Nov 05, 2025, 11:56 PM UTC

immibis wrote: post #378

franciscop wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you give a reference please? I was literally going to recommend Netlify at work, but didn't after I saw that story.

Is $0.55/GB not enough reason to avoid them? I guess not if your business is making more than that - bandwidth expense for a shopping site shouldn't be a problem when the customers are spending $100 for every 0.1GB - but that price should realistically be closer to $0.01/GB or even $0.002/GB. Sounds like they're forwarding you AWS's extremely excessive bandwidth pricing.

> Is $0.55/GB not enough reason to avoid them?

Where did you read that? The pricing page says 10 credits per GB, and extra credits can be purchased at $10 per 1500 credit. So it's more like $0.067/GB.