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Self-Hosting Still Pays

servethehome.com

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Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#71

Post by Zelphyr »

vmception wrote: post #63
Zelphyr wrote: post #8

I see so often developers state something along the lines of, "We need to go with AWS!" (sometimes substituting AWS with GCP or Azure) and the reason they always give is "scalability". 99% of the time, what they're building not only doesn't need to scale to that degree but they somehow seem to think that it's always inherently cheaper. Meanwhile, when I build something for a client my first go-to is something like Di…

> my first go-to is something like DigitalOcean or Amazon LightSail I look at compute instance providers by how they charge and for what project. Sometimes I need more RAM, sometimes I need a faster CPU, sometimes I need more storage space accessed as a normal filesystem. Sometimes I need all of the above. So it might be DigitalOcean, it might be Linode, it might be some fly-by-night bare metal provider.

Yes, this is the right way to approach it in my opinion. Use the right tool for the job. So many people in this industry see everything as a nail and the hammer they know is all that is needed for it.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#72

Post by TravelPiglet »

Zach_the_Lizard wrote: post #45
shiftpgdn wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you actually use AWS or are you just parroting something you've read? Do you understand that with AWS you still have to setup instances, manage security updates, permission and deal with disaster response (US-East-1 outage?) If you've run anything at any scale for any length of time you'll know that EC2 hosts frequently get rebooted with short notice.

If you're at the scale where a data center going down is a problem and thus you need to run in multiple coasts for disaster recovery, you're going to have to be able to handle the kinds of distributed computing issues that'll crop up in both cases. The advantage of AWS is that in theory you can script your infrastructure. Deploy to multiple zones, add hosts, remove hosts, deploy artifact, etc. Makes all kinds of thin…

The cost of being down might be high and happens seldom enough that hiring people to sit idle is really expensive.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#73

Post by unethical_ban »

WhatIsDukkha wrote: post #37
KingMachiavelli wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No better reliability? Pretty sure EC2 instances and EBS volumes have a lot more redundency than a single server. You really need two colocated servers to replace a single EC2 instance. Still probably cheaper but also a larger time investment. If the difference between AWS vs colocation is an additional FTE then AWS is cheaper.

I'm always nonplussed by the "additional FTE" argument, its obscenely overestimated - """We are going to say we used four hours of labor. This includes drive time to the primary data center. Since it is far away (18-20 minute drive), we actually did not go there for several quarters. So over 32 months, we had budgeted $640 for remote hands. We effectively either paid $160/ hr or paid less than that even rounding up t…

About 7 years ago we brought in the ELK stack for security log ingestion and basic analytics. It took at least three FTEs to maintain the cluster, along with constant issues of queries crashing clusters, or provisioning/building/repairing the dozens of servers and storage units to handle the several terabytes per day of ingest.

To be able to throw that behind an infinite, horizontally scalable mechanism would have saved us a lot of pain and troubleshooting.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#74

Post by tnolet »

Zelphyr wrote: post #8

I see so often developers state something along the lines of, "We need to go with AWS!" (sometimes substituting AWS with GCP or Azure) and the reason they always give is "scalability". 99% of the time, what they're building not only doesn't need to scale to that degree but they somehow seem to think that it's always inherently cheaper. Meanwhile, when I build something for a client my first go-to is something like Di…

You don’t go for AWS for EC2.

You go for AWS because in half a day you can whip up a secure, managed and auto scaling app using their proprietary services like SQS, S3, Lambda, Kinesis, Dynamo etc.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#75

Post by umvi »

Zelphyr wrote: post #8

I see so often developers state something along the lines of, "We need to go with AWS!" (sometimes substituting AWS with GCP or Azure) and the reason they always give is "scalability". 99% of the time, what they're building not only doesn't need to scale to that degree but they somehow seem to think that it's always inherently cheaper. Meanwhile, when I build something for a client my first go-to is something like Di…

Well for me it's more like... why should I pay $5/month for the cheapest DO droplet for a little utility web app that gets less than one hit per day?

Seems like a waste to pay for a month of VM time when only a few milliseconds are actually used. I like the idea of FaaS where I'm not being charged when my code isn't running.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#76

Post by code4tee »

The fact that static old school servers in the cloud are more expensive than hosting it yourself is news to precisely nobody. That’s not the business case for the cloud. In 2020 if your tech stack is still a monolith of giant servers on a rack somewhere you’ve got far bigger problems in your future.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#77

Post by emperor_ »

Rantenki wrote: post #10

TIL: AWS is only expensive if your time has no value. Article neglected to add the cost of labour for setup (edit: aside of racking), maintenance (security updates on infrastructure, etc), and disaster response. It also missed the cost of downtime based on projected MTTR for a failure. The word "fail" only appears once in the page, and not in regards to recovery, only preventative replacement. It's absolutely true th…

The labor was added in this calculation with data from the last 3 years. It's a lot less then one might think.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#78

Post by nucleardog »

saberience wrote: post #66

So, as someone that works for an enterprise that uses AWS... if we went colocation, how would we replicate: SQS/SNS, DynamoDB, ECS (EC2 and Fargate), Lambda, Kinesis, ECR, ALB, Aurora, S3, Glacier, EMR, EKS, multiple AZs, multiple regions, etc? For us to get the same functionality as all of these services in colocated data centers would be an INSANE amount of work, we'd have to hire so many IT/hardware specialists fo…

Yeah, at least for us the value of AWS is not in "is it cheaper to run a boring old server here".

It's in "how easily can we script and template all of our services and associated resources". It's in "when we need a highly durable and available queue, how much work/infra do we need".

When you factor all that stuff in, no way it comes out cheaper to self host here. Just the couple full time employees we need to setup and maintain all the ancillary stuff would cost us more than our AWS bill.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#79

Post by renewiltord »

teh_klev wrote: post #50
Patrick-STH wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are included in our colo costs with a second data center where we have a smaller DR cluster.

It never fails to amaze me how many HN contributors don't seem to read the linked articles yet seem compelled to tell you off for things you've already accounted for, explained and justified.

Mind quoting the section in the linked article that accounts for this, explains it, and justifies it?

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#80

Post by jasode »

If I'm reading the source html pages of "servethehome.com" correctly, it's a Wordpress site and that's what Patrick is basing hosting cost comparisons on.

I've mentioned before[0] that AWS too expensive and overkill for Wordpress sites (especially simpler non-ecommerce ones). I don't think this conclusion is controversial. Simpler hosting requirements is why Patrick only has to spend 4 hours of labor in 1 year to upgrade some hardware.

It's when you need the higher-level value-added services of AWS services (Dynamo, Redshift, region failover, etc) that the comparison becomes more complicated.

E.g. Companies with mission-critical transactional websites or mobile backends are more complex and they need agility to add/change the infrastructure landscape in response to unknown workloads. They don't have the money (or expertise) to code an in-house version of AWS services portfolio. E.g.[1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10797166

[1] https://www.cbronline.com/news/guardian-aws-migration

older archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20160319022029/https://www.compu...

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