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Why we moved away from AWS

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Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#61

Post by astral303 »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #54

The $750/month savings cited here is not real†, but for the sake of argument let's pretend it is. Is $750/month a significant amount of money for the company? In the USA, this is perhaps the cost of one engineer-day, and one could raise a year's worth of this money by successfully applying for a single additional credit card. (Not that I recommend bootstrapping with credit cards. But it has been done.) Of course, it…

I agree. This is an optimization. For many startups, it's not worth prematurely optimizing hosting costs, especially when figuring out the MVP/establishing market/growing customer base.

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#62

Post by vidarh »

Spooky23 wrote: post #51
notacoward wrote: post #8

AWS is just not very cost-effective in terms of performance per dollar, especially when it comes to storage performance (my own specialty). It only appears that they are because of the hourly billing and a human inability to compare quantities across nearly three orders of magnitude (hours vs. months) intuitively. Now that there are hundreds of vendors with hourly billing, as there have been for a while, it's easy to…

I just completed a project at an organization-owned datacenter where we wasted 4 months on needless BS to deploy about 12 servers. My team's time is easily worth $500-600/hr, so we easily wasted $300k. So the fact that my internal datacenter provider can give me a VM that costs 20% of what EC2 charges or disk that is more performant at a similar cost is interesting trivia, but isn't saving money.

For comparison, I moved a bunch of servers into a local datacentre a few months ago. It took us ~3 days to get a rack assigned, access arranged, and a couple of days to move and set up the physical servers for a single person. Fully loaded cost of the time spent was adds up to about $4k. Total leasing costs of the equipment (some of it has already been written off, but lets assume it was all new), rack cost, and 10Mbps CIR is about $1600/month for servers totalling about 80 x 2.4GHz cores, and ~20TB storage. Of course we need to factor in some maintenance cost, but the time cost for work spent managing the actual hardware as opposed to supporting the application environment, which we'd have to do regardless of hosting, adds a few hundred a month.

Comparing EC2 costs to what sounds like a completely botched project isn't very fair, in other words. Of course there are worse alternatives than EC2 as well.

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#63

Post by sbov »

Spooky23 wrote: post #51
notacoward wrote: post #8

AWS is just not very cost-effective in terms of performance per dollar, especially when it comes to storage performance (my own specialty). It only appears that they are because of the hourly billing and a human inability to compare quantities across nearly three orders of magnitude (hours vs. months) intuitively. Now that there are hundreds of vendors with hourly billing, as there have been for a while, it's easy to…

I just completed a project at an organization-owned datacenter where we wasted 4 months on needless BS to deploy about 12 servers. My team's time is easily worth $500-600/hr, so we easily wasted $300k. So the fact that my internal datacenter provider can give me a VM that costs 20% of what EC2 charges or disk that is more performant at a similar cost is interesting trivia, but isn't saving money.

So your whole team spent 4 full time months to get 12 servers deployed? That organization sounds rather degenerate.

We colocate at a datacenter and can get cabinets pretty easily. We've done this for over 10 years now. When we aren't growing or shrinking I spend about an extra 4 hours per month because we have physical servers rather than use something like AWS.

12 servers would probably take us about an extra 6 of our person-hours to get up and running vs AWS. If we needed a new cabinet it might take a couple days, but we aren't actively working - we put in a request, and they tell us when its ready for our use. We don't sit and twiddle our thumbs while this happens, and we do it before the development side of the project is completed.

We've talked about AWS before for the redundancy and convenience but the price and the extra headache of dealing with the inconsistent performance never made sense for our use.

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#65

Post by oijaf888 »

LanceH wrote: post #24

There is a dead spot between using EC2 on demand and paying for the 3 year reserved instance, both of which I've found to be practical. At both ends of that spectrum, however, I've found the pricing to be fairly reasonable. It just might not work for a startup.

How is the 3 year reserved instance practical given Amazon tends to cut prices significantly in a 3 year span? I've seen 1 year terms make sense but never 3 year.

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#66

Post by consultant23522 »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #54

The $750/month savings cited here is not real†, but for the sake of argument let's pretend it is. Is $750/month a significant amount of money for the company? In the USA, this is perhaps the cost of one engineer-day, and one could raise a year's worth of this money by successfully applying for a single additional credit card. (Not that I recommend bootstrapping with credit cards. But it has been done.) Of course, it…

Yes, $750 is about one engineer-day. Someone is now going to be spending at least a full day per month managing your new hardware, running security patches, etc. Even if your sysadmin guy is cheaper than an "engineer" it's not going to be cheap.

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#67

Post by russell_h »

nemesisj wrote: post #40
leokun wrote: post #13

If you move to Rackspace, stay away from DWS, the dallas datacenter. It's over-booked, the network has constant issues, vm's on the same host machine as you are able to cause your vm network issues, the list of problems never stops. We recently switched to Azure from Rackspace, but we're still evaluating if it will work for us long term. Azure's issues are that you have to request number of core increases, and you ca…

I'd stay away from Rackspace London as well. Horrible horrible experience. 1. Noisy neighbours impact you all the time 2. The staff are really poorly trained and don't know how to troubleshoot. 3. They're expensive. 4. Their control panels are really bad, constantly being updated and migrated, and are just a complete mess. 5. They've had several major network outages that have lasted for quite a long time (hours) tha…

Cloud Monitoring (disclaimer: I work on it) can actually be configured to poll as often as every 30 seconds from each location, or just every 30 seconds in the case of agent checks. I believe we default to 1 minute intervals, but if you want to change it you can browse to your check in our Control Panel and click the little edit icon where it says "Period: 60 seconds".

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#68

Post by adventured »

I've always found their bandwidth to be by far the most financially obnoxious aspect. $1,200 for just 10tb of bandwidth. You can get far more than that standard with any number of tremendous dedicated hosts on a $150 box. Digital Ocean charges a mere $0.02 for overages, by comparison.

I don't mind paying a premium for the easy systems and integration capabilities that AWS makes possible, but paying such extreme rates for bandwidth (when Amazon no doubt pays next to nothing per gb of bandwidth), is a cost too far.

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#69

Post by adventured »

manishsharan wrote: post #64

OVH is not accepting any new orders. They claim to be sold out of all nearly all server types. And that in a nutshell explains why AWS is a safer choice.

There are numerous other very good dedicated hosts that are alternatives to OVH. The pricing will be slightly higher, but OVH is dirt cheap to begin with compared to AWS. 1tb of transfer with Amazon will cost you almost as much as a nice e3 v2/v3 xeon server with 16gb to 32gb of memory and 10tb to 33tb of transfer.

Re: Why we moved away from AWS

#70

Post by zobzu »

Spooky23 wrote: post #51
notacoward wrote: post #8

AWS is just not very cost-effective in terms of performance per dollar, especially when it comes to storage performance (my own specialty). It only appears that they are because of the hourly billing and a human inability to compare quantities across nearly three orders of magnitude (hours vs. months) intuitively. Now that there are hundreds of vendors with hourly billing, as there have been for a while, it's easy to…

I just completed a project at an organization-owned datacenter where we wasted 4 months on needless BS to deploy about 12 servers. My team's time is easily worth $500-600/hr, so we easily wasted $300k. So the fact that my internal datacenter provider can give me a VM that costs 20% of what EC2 charges or disk that is more performant at a similar cost is interesting trivia, but isn't saving money.

OVH is specialized in deployment tho, there is NO "deployment BS". You get the machines nearly instantly. It doesn't one-click scale / unscale like AWS since you need to go purchase more machines and do the deploy, but the machines themselves are available as soon as you pay them.
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