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We cut our Mongo DB costs by 90% by moving to Hetzner

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Re: We cut our Mongo DB costs by 90% by moving to Hetzner

#71

Post by tracker1 »

mkesper wrote: post #50
poszlem wrote: post #38

As in so many of these stories, what gets glossed over is just how much complexity there is in setting up your own server securely. You set up your server. Harden it. Follow all the best practices for your firewall with ufw. Then you run a Docker container. Accidentally, or simply because you don’t know any better, you bind it to 0.0.0.0 by doing 5432:5432. Oops. Docker just walked right past your firewall rules, ign…

I don't see the point of using ufw at all as Hetzner provides an external firewall.

UFW doesn't add much overhead given the implementation in Linux is already in place, it's mostly just a convenient front-end. That said, you also need to be concerned with internal/peer threats as well as external ones...

Clearly defining your boundaries is important for both internal and external vectors of attack.

Re: We cut our Mongo DB costs by 90% by moving to Hetzner

#72

Post by mv4 »

"I cut my healthcare costs by 90% by canceling insurance and doctor visits."

In all seriousness, this is a recurring pattern on HN and it sends the wrong message. It's almost as bad as vibecoding a paid service and losing private customer data.

There was a thread here awhile ago, 'How We Saved $500,000 Per Year by Rolling Our Own “S3' [1]. Then they promptly got hacked. [2]

[1] https://engineering.nanit.com/how-we-saved-500-000-per-year-...

[2] https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/colorado-mom-stranger-...

Re: We cut our Mongo DB costs by 90% by moving to Hetzner

#73

Post by toast0 »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #17

> Here's how we managed to cut our costs by 90% You could cut your MongoDB costs by 100% by not using it ;) > without sacrificing performance or reliability. You're using a single server in a single datacenter. MongoDB Atlas is deployed to VMs on 2-3 AZs. You don't have close to the same reliability. (I'm also curious why their M40 instance costs $1000, when the Pricing Calculator ( https://www.mongodb.com/pricing )…

> Intelligent, robust design at one provider (like AWS) is way more resilient, and intra-zone transfer is cheaper than going out to the cloud ($0.02/GB vs $0.08/GB).

If traffic cost is relevant (which it is for a lot of use cases), Hetzner's price of $1.20/TB ($0.0012 / GB) for internet traffic [1] is an order of magnitude less than what AWS charges between AWS locations in the same metro. If you host only at providers with reasonable bandwidth charges, most likely all of your bandwidth will be billed at less than what AWS charges for inter-zone traffic. That's obscene. As far as I can tell, clouds are balancing their budgets on the back of traffic charges, but nothing else feels under cost either.

> For example, during the AWS outage, my company was in us-east-1, and we never had any issues, because we didn't depend on calling AWS APIs to continue operating. Things already running continue to run.

This doesn't always work out. During the GCP outage, my service was running fine, but other similar services were having trouble, so we attracted more usage, which we would have scaled up for, except that the GCP outage prevented that. Cloud makes it very expensive to run scaled beyond current needs and promises that scale out will be available to do just in time...

[1] https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/general/traffic/

Re: We cut our Mongo DB costs by 90% by moving to Hetzner

#74

Post by tracker1 »

zzzeek wrote: post #56

it's getting hard to ignore Hetzner (as a Linode user). Thing is, Linode was great 10-15 years ago, then enshittification ensued (starting with Akamai buying them). So what does enshittification for Hetzner look like? I've already got migration scripts pointed at their servers but can't wait for the eventual letdown.

IMO, virtual servers and dedicated server hosting is really commoditized at this point. So you have a lot of options... assuming you have appropriate orchestration and management scripted out, with good backup procedures in place, you should be able to shift to any other provider relatively easily.

The pain points are when you're also intwined with specific implementations for services from a given provider... Sure, you can shift from PostgreSQL on a hosted provider to another without much pain... but say SQS to Azure Simple Queues or Service Bus is a lot more involved. And that is just one example.

The is a large reason to keep your services to those with self-hosted options and/or self-hosting from the start... that said, I'm happy to outsource things that are easier to (re) integrate or replace.

Re: We cut our Mongo DB costs by 90% by moving to Hetzner

#75

Post by NorwegianDude »

CyanLite2 wrote: post #2

"We replaced a cluster of virtualized servers with a single bare metal server. Nothing has gone wrong, yet."

To be fair, a single server is way more reliable than cloud clusters.

Just look at the most recent many hour long Azure downtime where Microsoft could not even get microsoft.com back. With that much downtime you could physically move drives between servers multiple times each year, and still have less downtime. Servers are very reliable, cloud software is not.

I'm not saying people should use a single server if they can avoid it, but using a single cloud provider is just as bad. "We moved to the cloud, with managed services and redundancy, nothing has gone wrong...today"

Re: We cut our Mongo DB costs by 90% by moving to Hetzner

#76

Post by csunoser »

mv4 wrote: post #72

"I cut my healthcare costs by 90% by canceling insurance and doctor visits." In all seriousness, this is a recurring pattern on HN and it sends the wrong message. It's almost as bad as vibecoding a paid service and losing private customer data. There was a thread here awhile ago, 'How We Saved $500,000 Per Year by Rolling Our Own “S3' [1]. Then they promptly got hacked. [2] [1] https://engineering.nanit.com/how-we-sa…

Even after reading the source, it doesn’t seem like they were hacked? Or if they were, they were not accused of such.

I do think hand rolling your own thing is fraught. But it is very confusing to equate one mother’s complaint to “they have been hacked”.

PS: The people who made their own s3 rans a baby monitor company. News article is about a mother reporting hearing a weird voice from the baby monitour.

Re: We cut our Mongo DB costs by 90% by moving to Hetzner

#78

Post by mv4 »

csunoser wrote: post #76
mv4 wrote: post #72

"I cut my healthcare costs by 90% by canceling insurance and doctor visits." In all seriousness, this is a recurring pattern on HN and it sends the wrong message. It's almost as bad as vibecoding a paid service and losing private customer data. There was a thread here awhile ago, 'How We Saved $500,000 Per Year by Rolling Our Own “S3' [1]. Then they promptly got hacked. [2] [1] https://engineering.nanit.com/how-we-sa…

Even after reading the source, it doesn’t seem like they were hacked? Or if they were, they were not accused of such. I do think hand rolling your own thing is fraught. But it is very confusing to equate one mother’s complaint to “they have been hacked”. PS: The people who made their own s3 rans a baby monitor company. News article is about a mother reporting hearing a weird voice from the baby monitour.

Multiple reports on reddit suggest people making this baby cam do not understand security.

https://www.reddit.com/r/NewParents/comments/1ocgmoi/nanit_c... https://www.reddit.com/r/Nanit/comments/1ffc051/nanit_hacked... https://www.reddit.com/r/Nanit/comments/1dyaph6/heard_a_voic...

Re: We cut our Mongo DB costs by 90% by moving to Hetzner

#79

Post by isaacvando »

poszlem wrote: post #38

As in so many of these stories, what gets glossed over is just how much complexity there is in setting up your own server securely. You set up your server. Harden it. Follow all the best practices for your firewall with ufw. Then you run a Docker container. Accidentally, or simply because you don’t know any better, you bind it to 0.0.0.0 by doing 5432:5432. Oops. Docker just walked right past your firewall rules, ign…

There are also an enormous number of ways to build insecure apps on AWS. I think the difficulty of setting up your own server is massively overblown. And that should be unsurprising given that there are so many companies that benefit from developers thinking it's too hard.
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