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AWS and Azure Are at Least 4x–10x More Expensive Than Hetzner

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Re: AWS and Azure Are at Least 4x–10x More Expensive Than Hetzner

#61

Post by fxtentacle »

vishnugupta wrote: post #59
torginus wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you? While Amazon support is one of the better ones, you are still asking for an hour or two of time from a support guy who has no idea about your usecases or internal systems. They usually tend to be genuinely helpful but are a far cry from solving your issues themselves.

Given that AWS has been around for nearly two decades they have probably encountered and have a workaround/fix for 99.99% of the use cases. Of course there’s a minuscule possibility of you having a new use case. But is that good enough reason to build your infrastructure? That is a business call you need to make.

The problem is that if you're a regular-sized company, you will never reach any support person with experience inside AWS ;) And paying for Enterprise-grade support at a medium to small scale is probably more expensive than just hiring 1 skilled operator. And in the latter case, it then doesn't matter anymore if the problem takes 1 hour our 10 hours because your employee can take as much time as needed.

Re: AWS and Azure Are at Least 4x–10x More Expensive Than Hetzner

#62

Post by diggan »

Kostarrr wrote: post #18

Also note: traffic costs. On Hetzner, it's almost impossible to pay for traffic. Even their tiniest machine has 20 TB outgoing traffic (and unlimited incoming). If you used it up (you most probably wont), that's another 1,792 USD of costs saved by your tiny 4$/month VM compared to AWS. (At least if I was able to use the AWS cost calculator correctly). They will have object storage soon, but dont hold your breath for…

Additionally, go for the dedicated servers from Hetzner and you get a unmetered connection (eg: don't pay per GB ingress/egress at all). Not affiliated, but been happy with them since day 1.

Re: AWS and Azure Are at Least 4x–10x More Expensive Than Hetzner

#63

Post by sgarland »

redserk wrote: post #32
EdwardDiego wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, it's a false dichotomy you present, it's not a binary choice of fully managed or entirely roll your own. E.g., if you're running K8s (one thing I typically recommend you buy a managed one of), you can install your own Kafka in it, using an operator that does about 85% of what MSK does. Sure, you'll need to dedicate person hours to support the operator, but is supporting that any more expensive than sup…

You can open a ticket and make the weirdest of issues with MSK Amazon’s problem to deal with. Same with RDS, etc. It’s pretty great not to waste time when the lottery for the bizarrest of 0.000001% issues arise. The operator only solves the happy path. An AWS support ticket usually can solve the unhappy path.

This has not been my experience at multiple companies with AWS, even with heavy spend – your tickets have to make it through a gatekeeper who has no more idea than you on how to fix it, and more triage than anything else.

Re: AWS and Azure Are at Least 4x–10x More Expensive Than Hetzner

#64

Post by lelag »

It's not the same product, even if you consider just virtual machines rather than higher level services that others commenters are referring to. Sure public cloud is more expensive but you pay for the reliability of not being bound to physical hardware. When you buy a dedicated machine from OVH or Hetzner, you get a great deal for the compute power, but if something goes wrong with the hardware, you're stuck waiting for a technician to fix it.

Take the recent Lichess downtime, for example. Their main server had a hardware issue that required physical intervention. This meant the site was down for over 10 hours, and there wasn't much they could do except wait for OVH to send a tech.

If Lichess had been on AWS, the provider would have automatically moved their workload to a functioning server, and the outage would have been much shorter or possibly avoided altogether.

For Lichess, a non-profit, this tradeoff still make sense. Their service, while important to its users, isn't critical. Nobody dies if Lichess is down and the cost savings help them keep running. But if your business can't afford downtime, the extra guarantees from a public cloud provider can definitely be worth paying for.

Re: AWS and Azure Are at Least 4x–10x More Expensive Than Hetzner

#66

Post by fxtentacle »

Havoc wrote: post #58

Don’t think anyone sane that just needs cheap VM compute goes to AWS.

There's a seemingly endless supply of small to medium-sized companies doing exactly that. That's why there's consultants who offer to migrate you off EC2 onto 2-3 bare-metal hosts.

Re: AWS and Azure Are at Least 4x–10x More Expensive Than Hetzner

#67

Post by sgarland »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #36
redserk wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can open a ticket and make the weirdest of issues with MSK Amazon’s problem to deal with. Same with RDS, etc. It’s pretty great not to waste time when the lottery for the bizarrest of 0.000001% issues arise. The operator only solves the happy path. An AWS support ticket usually can solve the unhappy path.

Sure, but you can also go to a Slack channel and get help from the people who wrote the FOSS code you're using. For free. Yep, if your Kafka is mission critical and crashes hard, that is bad. But things like Kafka are _never_ a black box you just spin up and never worry about, if anyone thinks so, CAP theorem will give them an awful surprise one day. You're always going to need someone in your team who understands th…

> You're always going to need someone in your team who understands the tech and how to make best use of it.

…

> And that knowledge sits rather close to knowledge of how the system works, so given you'll need that knowledge anyway, may as well cultivate it instead.

This has been my argument forever, and it’s always met with disagreement, because entirely too many people have no desire to learn their tooling. They just want an API that they can push data into, and get it back out. What happens inside is irrelevant.

It’s extremely sad to me.

Re: AWS and Azure Are at Least 4x–10x More Expensive Than Hetzner

#68

Post by factormeta »

lelag wrote: post #64

It's not the same product, even if you consider just virtual machines rather than higher level services that others commenters are referring to. Sure public cloud is more expensive but you pay for the reliability of not being bound to physical hardware. When you buy a dedicated machine from OVH or Hetzner, you get a great deal for the compute power, but if something goes wrong with the hardware, you're stuck waiting…

>Take the recent Lichess downtime, for example. Their main server had a hardware issue that required physical intervention. This meant the site was down for over 10 hours, and there wasn't much they could do except wait for OVH to send a tech.

If you not a HN person with systemadmin skills yes. But is NOT that hard to have in house RADI hd setup, with failover server. Or failover NAT gateway. AWS and cloud provider are just a rip off.

Re: AWS and Azure Are at Least 4x–10x More Expensive Than Hetzner

#69

Post by chrisoverzero »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #28
obenn wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AWS equivalent to Cloud Run and Container Apps is called Fargate, https://aws.amazon.com/fargate/

Neither Fargate nor App Runner scale to zero (unless something changed). So there is always a baseline cost of a few dollars.

But if you’re constantly pinging the container (as suggested above), it will never scale to zero.

Re: AWS and Azure Are at Least 4x–10x More Expensive Than Hetzner

#70

Post by infecto »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #27
jasode wrote: post #19

>While AWS and Azure are industry leaders, their advantages often only materialize at massive scales. [...] Your comparisons are similar to many others out there that focus on measuring basic cpu and memory. This type of easy comparison where AWS/Azure/GCP is treated as a "dumb" datacenter is easy for alternatives like Hetzner or self-hosting to "win". >Do you really need the advanced features of AWS and Azure right…

Unfortunately, it's a false dichotomy you present, it's not a binary choice of fully managed or entirely roll your own. E.g., if you're running K8s (one thing I typically recommend you buy a managed one of), you can install your own Kafka in it, using an operator that does about 85% of what MSK does. Sure, you'll need to dedicate person hours to support the operator, but is supporting that any more expensive than sup…

That's ultimately the question. It comes down to cost and time. If you have enough scale that hiring a full-time person is more cost effective than paying for managed, great. On the flip side, you don't necessarily want to take engineering hours away from building the product you sell.
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