https://www.ionos.com/servers/vps
$7500/month would get them 150 such servers.
Maybe they should cut the AWS costs and hire their developer back.
Id be really interested to hear the breakdown of their AWS bill. It would be a crime if they were blowing what money they have giving Amazon 9 cents per gigabyte egress.
The problem here is that we all have opinions about hosting, but not so many useful opinions about business models, so hosting feedback is what this person is going to get.
Even if things have changed now, I can't imagine you'd find a great dev with 10 YoE for less than $80K/yr, and that's hiring globally (with the time zone issues that come with it). You can probably get 1 OK dev and 1 bad dev with 10 YoE for that price though, but you'd usually be better off just hiring one great dev than any other combination.
Also note that a lot of the things you are paying for (CPU cores, traffic, network throughput) in those nodes are shared resources (that Gbit link especially) and/or have “fair use” policies attached to them, and while the same might be true of cloud providers those policies are often either more generous or (perhaps more important from the business stability PoV) at least better defined.
“Cloud” is still expensive compared to buying and managing individual nodes, even if you add in all the above and the things I no doubt forgot to mention, but it does give a lot more than the same cost in individual nodes than this sort of comparison suggests. And sometimes just not having to deal with all that, keeping the business more focused on its core competencies, is worth the extra expense.
In DayJob we use Azure a lot, and sometimes I see the costs of certain things¹² and balk, and we do still have infrastructure people to manage the platform, but overall it works better for us than managing our own resources more directly. We have an extra complication due to our client base (regulated companies like banks and insurers, who are storing PII of both their own people and their customers with us) in that we have to give a lot of assurances on security and such which would be more work (it is already a _lot_ of work as anyone else in that sort of B2B arena can attest) if we self-managed everything.
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[1] $2,400/yr for SFTP access to a storage account if you need it available 24/7?! Especially given we have at least one such account per client as their requirements understandably require that level of separation. I think we'll keep using the relay & management dashboard I setup in a few cheap VMs, thanks…
[2] and the performance given the costs: AzureSQL³ I'm looking at you!
[3] though again, some of that cost is in things like the scaling flexibility and other infrastructure convenience, which the business finds worth paying for
History has proven that most of the time these reduce availability than increase them. Any sort of failover and the complicated setups to get it going introduces bugs and issues more than the redundancy it provides.
Have we forgotten the number of large single server applications running on single linux machines that never needed an unplanned restart or had a crash for years? And you can't beat AWS us-east-1 or Azure or GCP in outages lately.
And I doubt any service like this needs auto-scaling. Most services barely will use up a proper single server i.e. something with >96 cores >1TB of RAM.
> “Cloud” is still expensive compared to buying and managing individual nodes > And sometimes just not having to deal with all that, keeping the business more focused on its core competencies, is worth the extra expense.
There are ways to not manage all that and still be in the cloud. It's called don't use AWS or Azure.
No.
I run multi-site Ceph+Nomad clusters with NixOS on Hetzner for our startup and maintaining those takes less than 5% of my time.
By using great tools and understanding them well you can do it with little manpower. I learned all those tools in around 3 months total -- so around as much as getting a basic understanding of AWS IAM ;-)
The only thing you don't get with that from your list is auto-scaling. But the with Hetzner the price difference vs AWS is 10x for storage, 20x for compute, and 10000x for traffic, so we just over-provision a little. And my 5% time /includes/ manual upscaling.
Yes, I am oncall 24/7 to manage that infra, but I'd be as well when using hosted cloud services. Yes, fixing a Ceph issue, or handling Hashicorp Consul not handling an out-of-disk situation correctly is more complicated than waiting for S3 go come back from its outage, but the savings are massive. Testing whether your backup restore works is something you need to do equally with hosted services.
So it is definitely possible to self-manage everything, for 5% of one engineer.
“and understanding them well” is doing a lot of legwork there. From a standing start how does a startup that has the skills & experience to make the product but not necessarily manage the infrastructure get to the point of understanding the tools well, or even knowing which tools are best to learn to the point of understanding well?
> So it is definitely possible to self-manage everything, for 5% of one engineer.
I can accept that as true, if you have the right person/people, and they are willing (particularly the on-call part).
What would you prefer, this website eventually shutting down because the donations barely cover hosting costs and there's nobody to maintain it, or the website occasionally going down but otherwise actually being profitable enough that the founder can continue maintaining it on a part-time basis and keeping the site alive?
