I’d like to thank the admins for being so open and direct about the issues that they’re facing.
I laughed :)
Oh goodness, why is this so funny? lol.
I don’t get why anyone hosts Servers running 24/7 on AWS/GCloud/Azure. The pricing is just outrageous. Everyone else will be cheaper
To be fair, with a proper autoscaling scheme in place these services should scale down significantly when not in use.
That being said, a big reason for using AWS/GCP is all the additional services that are available on the platform… If the workload being run isn’t that complicated, the hyperscalers are probably overkill. Even DO or Linode would be a better option under those circumstances.
This. AWS architect here. There are a lot of ways to reduce pricing in AWS like horizontal scaling, serverless functions, reserved instances. Most people aren’t aware of it and if you’re going to dive in head first into something like cloud, you’ll need to bear the consequences and then learn eventually.
Even with ASGs, ec2 costs a bomb for performance.
And “serverless” functions are a trap.
If you’re gonna commit to reserved instances, just buy hardware for goodness sake, its a 3 year commitment with a huge upfront spend.
And “serverless” functions are a trap.
How are serverless functions a trap? They seem like a great cheap option for simple CRUD / client > server > db apps (what most apps end up being).
Anything that is “cheap” to do on serverless is cheaper to do on a $5 droplet, especially once it starts to grow.
Serverless gets you to buy in to a vendors lock-in.
Interesting, I’ll check out droplets, but in my experience with Azure Functions there’s not much vendor lock in. My API was just a normal Node.js / express server, the only part that was locked in to Azure Functions was the format for the endpoint definitions, but those can be adjusted in like an hour’s worth of time to anything else
AWS is perfect for large operations that value stability and elasticity over anything else.
It’s very easy to just spin up a thousand extra servers for momentary demand or some new exciting project. It’s also easy to locate multiple instances all over the world for low latency with your users.
If you know you’re going to need a couple servers for years and have the hardware knowhow, then it’s cheaper to do it yourself for sure.
It’s also possible to use aws more efficiently if you know all of their services. I ran a small utils website for my friends and I on it a while ago and it was essentially free since the static files were tiny and on s3 and the backend was lambda which gives you quite a few free calls before charging.
Habit (guess). Its what is used professionally, despite being proven over and over that cost-per-speed is terrible compared to less known providers.
That, and like others mentioned their flexibility, plus the fact that they’re fairly reliable (maybe less than some good Iaas providers but a fair bit more than your consumer vps places). Moments ago I went to the hetzner site to check them out and got:
Status Code 504 Gateway Timeout
The upstream server failed to send a request in the time allowed by the server. If you are the Administrator of the Upstream, check your server logs for errors.
Annoying if it’s you nextloud instance down for a minutes, but a worthy trade off if you’re paying 1/4 of the price. Extremely costly for big business or even risking peoples’s lives for a few different very important systems.
Hetzner has four nines availability, usually higher. AWS claims five nines but chances are you’ll mess up something on your end and end up at three to two nines, anyway. If you really need five nines you should probably colocate and only use the likes of AWS as a spike backup.
And I guess “messed something up on your end” happened in that case: I don’t think Hetzner is necessarily in the habit of maximising availability of their homepage at all cost (as opposed to the hosting infrastructure), you probably caught them in a middle of pushing a new version.
…speaking of spike backups: That is what AWS is actually good for. Quickly spinning up stuff and shutting it down again before it eats all your money.
I’m not a server admin, but I am a dev, and for many of us it’s just what we know because it’s what our employers use. So sadly, when it comes to setting up infrastructure on our own time, the path of least resistance is just to use what we’re already used to.
Personally I’m off AWS now though, but it definitely took some extra work (which was worth it, to be clear).
If the average Web engineer’s salary capable of running a site like this is ~$180,000, then a $30,000 difference in cost is only about 2 months salary. Learning and dealing with a new hosting environment can easily exceed that.
What’s that? Taxes? And no way do I agree with this. $30k is a lot, no matter how much you make. Learning a new environment is not THAT hard.
It is, but learning a new environment, then dealing with any down the line troubleshooting or instability can easily add up to $30,000 if you actually track where salaried employees time is going.
Oracle free tier, 4arm cores, 200gb storage, 24gb ram, zero money’s spent
Oracle is all fun and games until they lose your instance’s IP or data and don’t give it back because you’re a free tier freeloader.
That sounds like the bitter expression of regret and experience.
I got a bunch of servers on OCI, but I’d never rely on it heavily without a backup plan or lack of attachment
No catch? Especially with Oracle? Hard to believe kinda, nothing is ever “free”.
It’s a great deal, if you stay small, the idea is a loss leader, they temp you in and you set up your service, then when you need to scale up, they charge the extras.
I host mine on my home wifi
I’m in your walls
Hetzner crowd says hi!
Figure 1: Human discovers that hosting a web service for hundreds of thousands of users is expensive.
deleted by creator
