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I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

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Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#81

Post by jonway »

winddude wrote: post #30
Sebb767 wrote: post #16

I dislike those black and white takes a lot. It's absolutely true that most startups that just run an EC2 instance will save a lot of cash going to Hetzner, Linode, Digital Ocean or whatever. I do host at Hetzner myself and so do a lot of my clients. That being said, the cloud does have a lot of advantages: - You're getting a lot of services readily available. Need offsite backups? A few clicks. Managed database? A f…

linode was better and had cheaper pricing before being bought by akamai

Akamai has some really good infrastructure, and an extremely competent global cdn and interconnects. I was skeptical when linode was acquired, but I value their top-tier peering and decent DDoS mitigation which is rolled into the cost.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#82

Post by saulpw »

tqi wrote: post #35

I'd be more interested to understand (from folk who were there) what the conditions were that made AWS et al such a runaway hit. What did folks gain, and have those conditions meaningfully changed in some way that makes it less of a slam dunk? My recollection from working at a tech company in the early 2010s is that renting rack space and building servers was expensive and time consuming, estimating what the right ha…

Computing power (compute, memory, storage) has increased 100x or more since 2005, but AWS prices are not proportionally cheaper. So where you were getting a reasonable value in ~2012, that value is no longer reasonable, and by an increasing margin.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#84

Post by JuniperMesos »

zigzag312 wrote: post #79
Sebb767 wrote: post #16

I dislike those black and white takes a lot. It's absolutely true that most startups that just run an EC2 instance will save a lot of cash going to Hetzner, Linode, Digital Ocean or whatever. I do host at Hetzner myself and so do a lot of my clients. That being said, the cloud does have a lot of advantages: - You're getting a lot of services readily available. Need offsite backups? A few clicks. Managed database? A f…

> A few clicks. Getting through AWS documentation can be fairly time consuming.

And making sure you're not making a security configuration mistake that will accidentally leak private data to the open internet because of a detail of AWS you were unaware of.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#85

Post by dabockster »

Sebb767 wrote: post #16

I dislike those black and white takes a lot. It's absolutely true that most startups that just run an EC2 instance will save a lot of cash going to Hetzner, Linode, Digital Ocean or whatever. I do host at Hetzner myself and so do a lot of my clients. That being said, the cloud does have a lot of advantages: - You're getting a lot of services readily available. Need offsite backups? A few clicks. Managed database? A f…

You're literally playing into what the author is criticizing.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#86

Post by dabockster »

jaredhallen wrote: post #45

I'm fully aware this is pedantic, but you can't save 10x. You can pay 1/10. You can save 90%. Your previous costs could have been 10x your current costs. But 10x is more by definition, not less. You can't save it.

Apples and oranges, tbh.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#87

Post by Aeolun »

winddude wrote: post #30
Sebb767 wrote: post #16

I dislike those black and white takes a lot. It's absolutely true that most startups that just run an EC2 instance will save a lot of cash going to Hetzner, Linode, Digital Ocean or whatever. I do host at Hetzner myself and so do a lot of my clients. That being said, the cloud does have a lot of advantages: - You're getting a lot of services readily available. Need offsite backups? A few clicks. Managed database? A f…

linode was better and had cheaper pricing before being bought by akamai

I don’t feel like anything really changed? Fairly certain the prices haven’t changed. It’s honestly been pleasantly stable. I figured I’d have to move after a few months, but we’re a few years into the acquisition and everything still works.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#88

Post by dabockster »

tqi wrote: post #35

I'd be more interested to understand (from folk who were there) what the conditions were that made AWS et al such a runaway hit. What did folks gain, and have those conditions meaningfully changed in some way that makes it less of a slam dunk? My recollection from working at a tech company in the early 2010s is that renting rack space and building servers was expensive and time consuming, estimating what the right ha…

> But maybe things have changed in ways that meaningfully changes the calculus?

I'd argue that Docker has done that in a LOT of ways. The huge draw to AWS, from what I recall with my own experiences, was that it was cheaper than on-prem VMware licenses and hardware. So instead of virtualizing on proprietary hypervisors, firms outsourced their various technical and legal responsibilities to AWS. Now that Docker is more mature, largely open source, way less resource intensive, and can run on almost any compute hardware made in the last 15 years (or longer), the cost/benefit analysis starts to favor moving off AWS.

Also AWS used to give out free credits like free candy. I bet most of this is vendor lock in and a lot of institutional brain drain.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#89

Post by veqq »

jaredhallen wrote: post #45

I'm fully aware this is pedantic, but you can't save 10x. You can pay 1/10. You can save 90%. Your previous costs could have been 10x your current costs. But 10x is more by definition, not less. You can't save it.

In English, x or time(s) after a number marks a "unit" used by various verbs. A 10x increase. Increase by 10x. Go up 10x. Some of these verbs are negative like decrease or save. "Save 10x" is the same as "divide by 10". Four times less, 5 times smaller etc. are long attested.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#90

Post by dabockster »

rand846633 wrote: post #76
throwup238 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS also made huge inroads in big companies because engineering teams could run their own account off of their budget and didn’t have to go through to IT to requisition servers, which was often red tape hell. In my experience it was just as much about internal politics as the technical benefits.

Absolutely. At several startups, getting a simple €20–50/month Hetzner server meant rounds with leadership and a little dance with another department to hand over a credit card. With AWS, leadership suddenly accepted that Ops/Dev could provision what we thought was right. It isn’t logically compelling, but that’s why the cloud gained traction so quickly: it removed friction.

> At several startups, getting a simple €20–50/month Hetzner server meant rounds with leadership and a little dance with another department to hand over a credit card.

That's not a startup if you can't go straight to the founder and get a definite yes/no answer in a few minutes.

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