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

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

learn.umh.app

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 142 posts

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

#91

Post by theshrike79 »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #21
theshrike79 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, most corporations have 2-3 _named_ account reps who are available on the company Slack and will visit your office 1-2 times a year to sync up that everything is working as it should. And they're not just salespeople, they've actually said multiple times if a feature doesn't work for us without trying to hold it wrong in a dangerous (and expensive) way.

> they've actually said multiple times if a feature doesn't work for us without trying to hold it wrong in a dangerous (and expensive) way. Can you give examples of this? I'd love to hear more about the kinds of guidance they can give.

We were building a matchmaking service for our mobile game and thought about using Amazon GameLift FlexMatch[0]. On the surface it would've worked.

BUT, it's _very_ highly geared towards fully-online games where everyone playing the game is connected to a server all the time. Our game was asynchronous PvP where the attacker was online, but the defender wasn't.

I had a 30 minute chat with them and they confirmed that it _could_ be made to work, but it'd be extremely janky and expensive in our use case.

We ended up building our own (or actually expanding our existing setup a bit).

--

We've also got pretty good estimates on how much something might cost: we have an application that needs a specific number of writes/reads with X amount of data per write, what would be the cost on different Amazon services.

Again they came back with numbers and with many services (DynamoDB especially) it would've been either impossible or prohibitively expensive. We ended up changing the application structure to do less IOPS + more aggressive caching and ended up using plain S3 as storage.

Without their consultation (And inside knowledge about AWS internal hard limits) we would've spent weeks building a solution that will eventually fail as the data stored per user goes up.

[0] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/gamelift/latest/flexmatchguide/m...

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

#92

Post by ywvcbk »

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.

You might not technically need it but some of the things offered by those services might be ‘nice to have’ for your specific use case. If they are not available with just Posgres+etc out of the box the few hundred/thousand $ additional costs might be entirely insignificant compared to the additional work-hours you’d need to implement those things.

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

#93

Post by theshrike79 »

FiberBundle wrote: post #20
theshrike79 wrote: post #15

...when using bare metal servers. Hetzner doesn't have the services AWS provides, that's the reason most companies I know use AWS for. If we could run our crap on any server, we would, but managed services are still cost-effective vs hiring our own 24/7/365 rotation of on-call ops people.

https://youtu.be/-cEn_83zRFw?feature=shared&t=1282

DHH + Basecamp aren't exactly a run of the mill company hiring mediocre talent.

They have the skills, cash flow, and resources to do whatever they want.

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

#94

Post by JeremyTheo »

tetha wrote: post #16

> Do you really need the advanced features of AWS and Azure right now? Or would a simple virtual machine at a reasonable price be sufficient? That’s the main question here. This is one of the more important points and why the point "The learning curve of a single server isn't so big, especially when compared to AWS" is sitting a bit wrong with me. Sure, if you talk about 1 VM, I agree. And I wouldn't second guess doi…

The article was originally intended at manufacturing companies, not at IT startups, that currently go "all-in" on AWS and Azure with all of their managed services, when actually 95% of their workloads are in virtual machines, and the remaining stuff could easily be handled on a single VM. Or maybe a couple of VMs and a managed postgres somewhere (e.g., maybe even at AWS or Azure).

Would probably give them way more budget in actually building applications than running the infrastructure.

Maybe I'll extend the article to include the point of using a managed postgres at AWS / Azure / fly.io, whatever, in combination with Hetzner VMs.

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

#95

Post by 999900000999 »

sgarland wrote: post #88
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.

I'm looking at the bare metal servers. I'm always open to being wrong...

I still don't think I feel like migration though. Captain Rover isn't exactly lightweight.

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

#96

Post by the_real_cher »

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…

Not to mention having to add additional security staff.

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

#97

Post by joshstrange »

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.

I agree, that's mostly because the usage patterns have become apparent and you know what features you need and what to optimise for. That's why I prefer managed services to start and then can self-host once price or needs pushes me to.

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

#98

Post by nijave »

sgarland wrote: post #90
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.

All these "VMs are sooo much cheaper" articles are always pricing bare VMs. It'd be more useful if someone actually calculated Total Cost of Ownership for a completed solution. You likely also need to price in load balancers, database servers, DNS, backups, access management, monitoring to get a fair quote and a meaningful comparison if you actually plan to run a real application

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

#99

Post by JeremyTheo »

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.

Agreed! See also the ahrefs example
Post reply on HN