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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

#51

Post by fennecbutt »

tqi wrote: post #35

I'd be more interested to understand (from folk who were there) what the conditions were that made AWS et al such a runaway hit. What did folks gain, and have those conditions meaningfully changed in some way that makes it less of a slam dunk? My recollection from working at a tech company in the early 2010s is that renting rack space and building servers was expensive and time consuming, estimating what the right ha…

Et al is for people, Et cetera is for things.

Edit: although actually many people on here are American so I guess for you aws is legally a person...

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

#52

Post by jgb1984 »

tqi wrote: post #35

I'd be more interested to understand (from folk who were there) what the conditions were that made AWS et al such a runaway hit. What did folks gain, and have those conditions meaningfully changed in some way that makes it less of a slam dunk? My recollection from working at a tech company in the early 2010s is that renting rack space and building servers was expensive and time consuming, estimating what the right ha…

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 datacenter to swap out a faulty PSU, the on site engineers take care of that for you. I ordered an extra server today from Hetzner. It was available 90 seconds afterwards. Using their installer I had Ubuntu 24.04 LTS up and running, and with some Ansible playbooks to finish configuration, all in all from the moment of ordering to fully operational was about 10 minutes tops. If I no longer need the server I just cancel it, the billing is per hour these days.

Bang for the buck is unmatched, and none of the endless layers of cloud abstraction getting in the way. A fixed price, predictable, unlimited bandwidth, blazing fast performance. Just you and the server, as it's meant to be. I find it a blissful way to work.

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

#53

Post by DANmode »

normie3000 wrote: post #32

Help convince me I should be confident taking responsibility for: * off-site db backups * a guaranteed db restore process * auditable access to servers * log persistence and integrity * timely security patching * intrusion detection so that my employer can save money.

How many URLs of Google et al failing to provide per instance security (leaking your files etc) to other users would you like to see?

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

#54

Post by baobun »

tqi wrote: post #35

I'd be more interested to understand (from folk who were there) what the conditions were that made AWS et al such a runaway hit. What did folks gain, and have those conditions meaningfully changed in some way that makes it less of a slam dunk? My recollection from working at a tech company in the early 2010s is that renting rack space and building servers was expensive and time consuming, estimating what the right ha…

One factor was huge amounts of free credits for the first year or more for any startup that appeared above-board and bothered to ask properly.

Second, egress data being very expensive with ingress being free has contributed to making them sticky gravity holes.

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

#55

Post by PantaloonFlames »

jaredhallen wrote: post #45

I'm fully aware this is pedantic, but you can't save 10x. You can pay 1/10. You can save 90%. Your previous costs could have been 10x your current costs. But 10x is more by definition, not less. You can't save it.

+1 words matter

Clarity of expression is a superpower

I don’t feel it’s pedantic at all.

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

#56

Post by nemo »

fennecbutt wrote: post #51
tqi wrote: post #35

I'd be more interested to understand (from folk who were there) what the conditions were that made AWS et al such a runaway hit. What did folks gain, and have those conditions meaningfully changed in some way that makes it less of a slam dunk? My recollection from working at a tech company in the early 2010s is that renting rack space and building servers was expensive and time consuming, estimating what the right ha…

Et al is for people, Et cetera is for things. Edit: although actually many people on here are American so I guess for you aws is legally a person...

As an American who studied Latin:

Et al. = et alii, "and other things", "among other things".

Etc. = et cetera, "and so on".

Either may or may not apply to people depending on context.

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

#58

Post by dragonwriter »

fennecbutt wrote: post #51
tqi wrote: post #35

I'd be more interested to understand (from folk who were there) what the conditions were that made AWS et al such a runaway hit. What did folks gain, and have those conditions meaningfully changed in some way that makes it less of a slam dunk? My recollection from working at a tech company in the early 2010s is that renting rack space and building servers was expensive and time consuming, estimating what the right ha…

Et al is for people, Et cetera is for things. Edit: although actually many people on here are American so I guess for you aws is legally a person...

> although actually many people on here are American so I guess for you aws is legally a person...

Corporate legal personhood is actually older than Christianity, and it being applied to businesses (which were late to the game of being allowed to be corporations) is still significantly older than the US (starting with the British East India Company), not a unique quirk of American law.

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

#59

Post by PaulKeeble »

Its not actually that hard to get your own server racked up in a data centre, I have done it. Since it was only one box that I built and installed at home I just shipped it and they racked it in the shared area and plugged the power and network in and gave me the IP address. It was cheaper than renting from someone like hetzner, was about £15 a month at the time for 1A and 5TB a month of traffic at 1gbps. Also had a one off install fee of £75.

At the time I did this no one had good gaming CPUs in the cloud, they are still a bit rare really especially in VPS offerings and I was hosting a gaming community and server. So I made a pair of machines in a 1U with dual machines in there and had a public and private server with raid 1 drives on both and redundant power. Ran that for a gaming server for many years until it was obsolete. It wasn't difficult and I think the machine was about £1200 in all, which for 2 computers running game servers wasn't too terrible.

I didn't do this because it was necessarily cheaper, I did it because I couldn't find a cloud server to rent with a high clockspeed CPU in it. I tested numerous cloud providers, sent emails asking for specs and after months of chasing it down I didn't feel like I had much choice. Turned out to be quite easy and over the years it saved a fortune.

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

#60

Post by puttycat »

It's an informative post but I really dislike the language and style that are becoming common in this kind of posts, e.g.:

> Look, first of all, you’re as unique as the other 1000 peanut gallery enjoyers that have made the same astute observation before you. Congratulations. But you’re absolutely missing the point.

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