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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

#81

Post by m-i-l »

This matches my experience. I ran one of my side-projects on AWS for a couple of years before switching to Hetzner - AWS was around £35 a month while Hetzner was around £7 a month, so Hetzner was around 80% cheaper for an equivalent service[0]. The other big thing was all the little costs in AWS - it took 2 months to get the AWS bill down to £0 due to all the hidden extras like backups and Elastic IP address.

[0] Full details at https://blog.searchmysite.net/posts/migrating-off-aws-has-re...

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

#82

Post by jiggawatts »

mxuribe wrote: post #76
jiggawatts wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the result of MBA-driven enshittification. "In the beginning" the clouds promised to use their scale to soak up your unpredictable demand. You as the customer didn't have to think about capacity, or planning ahead, budgets, opex, etc... Just swipe your credit card and go from zero to any number you please and back again at any time of your choosing. Because there are so many other customers using the cloud with…

Bleh and yuck! I'm finding myself nodding in agreement with all that you stated, but not feeling good about it because of the reality of things! :-)

The reality is that with the maximum discount, the public cloud is still 2x the cost of comparable hosting providers (including on-prem).

More realistically, I've found that the cost is between 3x to 7x what people were paying for before.

I'm not surprised cloud adoption has slowed to a crawl. Azure and AWS won't admit this publicly because it would tank their share price, but they can't hide it from observant people. For example, they used to get the latest Intel or AMD CPUs before retail availability in huge numbers. Now? They're 2-3 generations behind because they're not rolling out new servers in significant numbers. The customers are all tightening their belts because of the global economic downturn, and one of the most expensive things they've been splurging on before was public cloud hosting.

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

#83

Post by jojobas »

londons_explore wrote: post #29
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…

Continuing this reasoning... As soon as your startup does get big, it starts to make more sense to try and migrate to 'dumb' machines and save on infrastructure costs, especially if your business is low margin and your infrastructure costs are high.

Unfortunately by that time you're mired in EKS, SQS, EFS and whatever other 3-letter services, unpicking which is more expensive than months of operation on AWS.

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

#84

Post by olieidel »

factormeta wrote: post #68
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 a…

Even something as magical as a RAID won't make a technician instantly teleport to your server, power it down in zero seconds, swap out the hard drive and boot it back up in another zero seconds.

OPs comment is valid - physical servers might incur downtime.

But I do agree with your sentiment. "Downtime" is not an argument which should tilt the discussion towards either physical servers or the cloud. AWS data centers famously also have outages, while physical servers often have uptimes of multiple years. So what's better? It's hard to tell, but at the very least, none of these solutions is downtime-free.

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

#85

Post by lelag »

factormeta wrote: post #68
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 a…

It is hard.

Lichess admins are highly skilled and I'm sure they already have a well designed infrastructure. You can see what they use at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Si3PMUJGR9KrpE5lngSk...

The issue was on a network equipment that they didn't even manage. You can't load balance when your core network is down. There was nothing they could do as I understand it.

More details at: https://lichess.org/@/Lichess/blog/post-mortem-of-our-longes...

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

#86

Post by nobleach »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #44
CPLX wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For free Not sure we agree on the meaning of this phrase in this context.

If you ever hit an issue with Kafka or Strimzi, go to their Slack, some of the most intelligent people I've ever had the privilege to work alongside will be there, helping you. For 0 money. That kinda free.

And while that's super awesome that someone feels passionately enough about a piece of tech - that they're willing to spend their precious resources helping others... that kind of charity is untenable. You can't expect that person to be there at 3am when systems are down and your nightly processing jobs are failing.

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

#87

Post by handwarmers »

taberiand wrote: post #77
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…

The caveat to this is, you might think you need RDS, SQS, SNS, S3, Lambda, DynamoDB, Elasticache and Kinesis - but you probably only need Postgres.

one day someone will rewrite postgres in rust, and i will have to switch to carpentry full time to preserve my sanity.

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

#88

Post by sgarland »

999900000999 wrote: post #56

AWS is like the tool I know. I pay roughly 30$ for a CaptainRover install running on Lightsail. Hetzner starts at 50 Euro, only has servers and Europe and is going to require a ton more work. AWS has the right idea, they give everyone who asks nicely thousands in free credits to get started. Then 2 years in your hooked. I don't want to learn a new system.

Hetzner Cloud has US and Singapore locations as well, and starts at 5 Euro.

It will take slightly more effort than Lightsail, yes.

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

#89

Post by CharlieDigital »

chrisoverzero wrote: post #69
CharlieDigital wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It "scales to zero" as soon as the request stops as far as billing is concerned.

However, the image remains "warm" and incurs zero cost once the last request ends. So I usually have a `/heartbeat` endpoint for this purpose and point a Cloud Scheduler job at it.

I haven't read the docs to figure out the exact heuristics of when it becomes "cold" again.

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

#90

Post by sgarland »

nijave wrote: post #43

Do people want to use VMs? Imo they're much more annoying to manage than higher-level managed services. The last few places I've worked we spent our time trying to get rid of VMs and replace them with equivalent managed services. Even with automation tools like Ansible or immutable server images, packing as Docker images and running on a container orchestrator have always been much easier.

Depends if you want to pay more in money(a lot more) indefinitely, or pay more in time up front to set up automation. If you have immutable images, I don’t see how there is much difference at all. There are many container orchestrators available.
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