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I got pwned by my cloud costs

troyhunt.com

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Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#71

Post by closeparen »

lpcvoid wrote: post #56

Can somebody explain to me why I wouldn't just rent a 40 EUR dedicated server from Hetzner with unlimited traffic and gigabit uplink? His 600GB/day is way less than what you get over a gigabit link within a day. Sure, sudden bursts would perhaps "throttle" at a gigabit, but according to his article that was only the cloudflare proxy anyhow, so no pain in having that take a few seconds longer. As far as I am concerned…

Perhaps for the same reason that the vast majority of the readers of this site don’t use Hetzner: they are not European and neither are their users.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#72

Post by bennyp101 »

lpcvoid wrote: post #56

Can somebody explain to me why I wouldn't just rent a 40 EUR dedicated server from Hetzner with unlimited traffic and gigabit uplink? His 600GB/day is way less than what you get over a gigabit link within a day. Sure, sudden bursts would perhaps "throttle" at a gigabit, but according to his article that was only the cloudflare proxy anyhow, so no pain in having that take a few seconds longer. As far as I am concerned…

Because it's not cool, and won't make your CV sparkle.

I'm sure there becomes a point where cost of (hardware + maintenance + staffing) > (cloud + staffing), in which case sure crack on. But like you, I'll stick to a rented server for my stuff.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#73

Post by hardwaresofton »

lpcvoid wrote: post #56

Can somebody explain to me why I wouldn't just rent a 40 EUR dedicated server from Hetzner with unlimited traffic and gigabit uplink? His 600GB/day is way less than what you get over a gigabit link within a day. Sure, sudden bursts would perhaps "throttle" at a gigabit, but according to his article that was only the cloudflare proxy anyhow, so no pain in having that take a few seconds longer. As far as I am concerned…

Well there’s a gap between the amount of convenience you get on the major clouds and one like Hetzner.

I’m a huge Hetzner fan, and their cloud offering is definitely growing but still isn’t as convenient and featureful as it could be (and they don’t share their roadmap currently so hard to tell what they’re working on next).

I’m trying to do something about it though, working on Nimbus Web Services[0]. In my mind all we need is something to bridge the managed services gap and make it very easy to set up the basic 3 tier app with some amount of scale/performance elasticity!

[0]: https://nimbusws.com

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#74

Post by that_guy_iain »

lpcvoid wrote: post #56

Can somebody explain to me why I wouldn't just rent a 40 EUR dedicated server from Hetzner with unlimited traffic and gigabit uplink? His 600GB/day is way less than what you get over a gigabit link within a day. Sure, sudden bursts would perhaps "throttle" at a gigabit, but according to his article that was only the cloudflare proxy anyhow, so no pain in having that take a few seconds longer. As far as I am concerned…

> As far as I am concerned, I just don't understand why people use cloud services.

For companies the benefits are the abiltiy to get new servers at a click of a button and get rid of a server. For example, asking the ops team to setup a snapshot of a database for a few hours while I do something is super useful.

There is also the ability to use autoscale and other stuff to automagically scale your system to handle traffic peaks. With dedcicated servers you need to always have those resources available. It's attractive to managers that they're only paying for resources when they're using it.

There are also managed services like DynamoDb, Lambda, S3, etc that can make things easier and reduce your sysadmin work. And allow you to get up and running very quickly.

Obivously, a major downside is that the pricing is extremely vulnerable to spikes like this. I think we see an article like this every 3 months or so. This one is rather tame compared to some others that were 10x as much for a 24-hour period.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#75

Post by scanr »

I wonder how much of the cloud provider revenue comes from situations like this. I suspect quite a lot.

I think that the cloud provider business model that allows for uncapped maximum costs is a bit of a commercial dark pattern. What makes it somewhat more nefarious is that it is relatively easy to blame the customer.

I’m not surprised that the cloud providers are quick to refund users as it’s likely that they only do it in a fraction of cases and it buys a lot of goodwill.

It would be interesting to try and design a cloud that supports OutOfMoneyException’s with gradual degradation and capped liability for costs built in.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#76

Post by lpcvoid »

closeparen wrote: post #71
lpcvoid wrote: post #56

Can somebody explain to me why I wouldn't just rent a 40 EUR dedicated server from Hetzner with unlimited traffic and gigabit uplink? His 600GB/day is way less than what you get over a gigabit link within a day. Sure, sudden bursts would perhaps "throttle" at a gigabit, but according to his article that was only the cloudflare proxy anyhow, so no pain in having that take a few seconds longer. As far as I am concerned…

Perhaps for the same reason that the vast majority of the readers of this site don’t use Hetzner: they are not European and neither are their users.

Hetzner is just an example - you can get cheap dedicated boxes with gigabit uplinks all over the world. And in this example it's not even important what latency the server has, since it was only feeding Cloudflares CDN with data.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#77

Post by Dave3of5 »

Ah the old cloud provider switcheroo. Yip this is the way they make money. They make it easy to setup some gigantic hugely scalable website then hit you with a gigantic scaled up bill. AWS would do this as well.

Team I'm in at the moment is in the early stages of cloud adoption but the company in total has fell hook line and sinker for AWS. When I mentioned the cost there is always an excuse.

The main one being that you don't have to hire sysadmins anymore as that's taken care now by AWS. Ah yes but they have actually been replaced with a "DevOps" team plus just our department now spend > £1 million per year to AWS in hosting costs. A 20% reduction in those fees could pay for a few sysadmin(s).

The next one is that no other vendor would be able to supply the kit. You know StackOverflow is able to run on a single webserver (https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-ar...). Plus many of the other providers have loads of instances available.

I mean I'm not against cloud it's just not the cheapest option if you choose one of the big 3 providers. I use a company called scaleway (https://www.scaleway.com/en/) they have all the essential cloud services you need and everything else you can run yourself in docker or k8s.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#78

Post by dt3ft »

lpcvoid wrote: post #56

Can somebody explain to me why I wouldn't just rent a 40 EUR dedicated server from Hetzner with unlimited traffic and gigabit uplink? His 600GB/day is way less than what you get over a gigabit link within a day. Sure, sudden bursts would perhaps "throttle" at a gigabit, but according to his article that was only the cloudflare proxy anyhow, so no pain in having that take a few seconds longer. As far as I am concerned…

Not much to explain, you're absolutely right. Hetzner would have been a much wiser choice here, but advocating any cloud provider at this scale probably has its perks too or he wouldn't be burning his money. Then again, perks only go so long and at some point do come to an end, so this is why he may be writing about costs right now.

Take a look at their datacenter in Germany: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eo8nz_niiM

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#79

Post by zarzavat »

lpcvoid wrote: post #56

Can somebody explain to me why I wouldn't just rent a 40 EUR dedicated server from Hetzner with unlimited traffic and gigabit uplink? His 600GB/day is way less than what you get over a gigabit link within a day. Sure, sudden bursts would perhaps "throttle" at a gigabit, but according to his article that was only the cloudflare proxy anyhow, so no pain in having that take a few seconds longer. As far as I am concerned…

> I just don't understand why people use cloud services.

1, when they need to adjust rapidly between different resource usage profiles, e.g. because they are growing rapidly and can't predict what the usage will be X days in advance

2. They have huge resource requirements and don't care to invest in their own infrastructure, but can negotiate lower rates with a cloud provider

3. When their resource usage is modest but profitability is high enough that cloud expenditure is a rounding error

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