Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Self-Hosting Still Pays

servethehome.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 343 posts

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#91

Post by Zelphyr »

drchopchop wrote: post #47
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…

Also, when it comes time to scale, it's a lot easier to bring up a relatively simple (but scalable) infrastructure on AWS than deal with: colo location, buying servers, buying spares, replacing failing hardware, imaging, setting up backups, etc etc. Those typically become concerns once you're at big scale where the cost savings are significant.

For what it's worth; unlike OP, I'm not suggesting Co-Lo over cloud. Co-Lo still has its place but for most projects that I'm involved with, low-cost services like DigitalOcean, Linode, or LightSail is the best option.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#92

Post by vonmoltke »

Rantenki wrote: post #56
vonmoltke wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're such an underestimate as to be laughable If I am reading the post correctly, those are actuals , not estimates.

They are perfect world actual hours that don't include any unexpected downtime, or any ancillary costs outside of racking.

> They are perfect world actual hours that don't include any unexpected downtime

It isn't clear from this particular post, but considering Patrick refers to "overprovisioning" and having a "hot spare" I get the impression that they have designed their DC setup to minimize unexpected downtime. Sure, it can still happen, but with proper up-front planning what you call "perfect world" can become typical.

> or any ancillary costs outside of racking

As I see it from Patrick's post and my own colo experience, there are three groups of costs for colo that are baked in to the cost of AWS compute and storage: capital cost of hardware (Patrick has a specific line item for this); facility cost; and labor for maintaining the hardware (which is the cost under discussion. What do you think is significant, missing, and unique to colo?

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#93

Post by rsync »

bpodgursky wrote: post #22

Even ignoring labor, none of these analyses ever consider BC/DR or backup costs. S3 for backups is the single biggest ease-of-mind feature AWS provides, IMO. I do not want all my data sitting in a single colocation facility without backups. If I run a database on RDS, maybe it costs more than a bare-metal server, but I can replicate the automatic hourly backups to as many regions as I want. Incredible peace of mind o…

"S3 for backups is the single biggest ease-of-mind feature AWS provides, IMO. I do not want all my data sitting in a single colocation facility without backups."

I'm biased, but in my opinion if your infrastructure is on AWS and your backups are on AWS you're doing it wrong. Even accounting for zones and geo-disparity, etc.

Luckily:

  ssh user@rsync.net rclone s3:/some/bucket /rsync.net/home
... which is made possible by rclone[1], which is excellent, and the fact that rsync.net has rclone built into the remote environment[2] such that you can execute it over SSH.

[1] https://rclone.org/

[2] https://www.rsync.net/products/rclone.html

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#94

Post by pwinnski »

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…

100% agreed. Every one of those AWS services can be reproduced in a colo, but it takes time and effort to set up a queueing solution which just exists already in AWS. It takes time and effort to set up notifications for storage and database events which are easy-as-anything in AWS.

Even without getting into multiple availability zones, things like SQS/SNS, Dynamo, S3, and Lamda combine to make things very easy on day one with AWS.

Could it be cheaper? Well, yeah, I'm sure. And if all you're doing is running EC2 instances, go somewhere else. But also, maybe look into some of the other stuff AWS provides!

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#95

Post by Zelphyr »

busterarm wrote: post #85
Zelphyr wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds to me like you're describing a corporate environment with all the bureaucracy that comes with such an environment. That scenario likely has the traffic and revenue to justify a full AWS build out. I'm talking about new projects at much smaller companies, or much smaller departments within the company that don't yet know if the product they're building is going to even work. Not to mention; I have the same f…

If you know how to build in AWS cost-effectively (and really to cost-effectively use compute in general), I would still pick cloud over buying any hardware. For my last gig I was hosting the web infrastructure for a 5B/yr enterprise with a low-5 digit Alexa Rank on roughly $100/mo in EC2 instances. That was after converting the property to a static site built with jekyll (you can do pretty amazing, magical-looking th…

I've mentioned this elsewhere but; I'm not arguing co-location over cloud. I'm arguing inexpensive cloud like DigitalOcean, Linode, or LightSail over a complex AWS configuration designed to scale with near infinite flexibility. Why does a product that gets 100 visitors a day need that? $5-10/month serves them just fine.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#97

Post by mark242 »

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…

Someone who is doing a cost comparison of running Wordpress and forums has absolutely no idea about any of those mentioned services and the power they bring.

SQS is just such an amazing tool in a developer's toolkit that is one of those transformational pieces to how you write software. Combine that with Lambda to consume messages, S3 as your object storage, and Dynamo as your state management, and you unlock the capability of a single engineer to write applications that would have taken teams and teams of people only a few years ago.

Again, does this mean anything to the Wordpress crowd? Probably not. But the ability to bring a new project to market quickly and grow that project is no longer bottlenecked by how fast you can get on your phone to your colo provider on Saturday night.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#98

Post by [deleted] »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #53
Patrick-STH wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100%. We had 11 months where nobody touched the racks as an example and the visit 11 months later was the one to physically get a tool I had left there. I mentioned I even track drive time.

For a business with growing needs (most people at the point of making the decision), won't they need to go to install more hardware frequently, if nothing else?

[deleted]

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#99

Post by tobyjsullivan »

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…

Is it safe to assume these are nascent startups that need scale to succeed?

If that's the case, then you are probably right that most will never need to scale. You can build them a solution that can't scale and it'll be the correct solution for the 90% that fail. And it'll be the wrong solution for the 10% that succeed.

Re: Self-Hosting Still Pays

#100

Post by ChymeraXYZ »

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…

I agree with the statement, but one thing to note is that if you were building for colocation you would probably build the whole thing in a different way. Not suggesting that it would be trivial or anything, but you probably would not replicate the mentioned services, more likely you would use other/different types of software packages (for example rabbitMQ for queues). It may not be the exact replica but it covers the use cases needed in your application (now no longer designed with "infinitely" scalable cloud).

While one of the benefits of things like AWS and GCP is the availability of all kinds of services, but at the same time we are to some extent loosing control. I have personally had several cases where I was thinking "This thing would be so useful" but AWS/GCP/Pick your cloud did not have it and it would have been a hassle to jam that one piece of supporting software together with the core services, so it never got taken into use.

Post reply on HN