Comment by gravypod | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gravypod | Hacker News Reader

I've always been set aback by how much AWS servers cost. Maybe I'm just too cheap but you can go to very reputable hosting companies and get things at fractions of the price.

For example, if I need 16GB of memory and 4 cores here are my options:

    * AWS (t2.xlarge) $137.62
    * OVH (EG-16)     $79
    * So You Start/OVH (SYS-IP-1S) $42
    * Kimsufi/OVH (KS-3B) $29
    * Hetzner (EX41) €46.41 [Lowest cost model is 32GB of ram]
    * Joe's Data Center (No model name) $45 [Duel socketed L5420 which is 8 cores]

That's a crazy price difference and, unlike frmo what I understand about AWS, you don't need to pay for bandwith for most of these companies or they have some crazy high limit. IIRC it's common for 20TB to be the standard (FREE) bandwith limit. You're also on real hardware, not a VM.

Unfortunately not all of these are perfect systems. There are issues with them. Some have slower CPUs, some have slower disks, some are in other countries but you can just pick the ones that suit your need for whatever you have to run. You can also use VMs that are far cheaper then these dedicated systems. If your workload is under 50% duty cycle on a CPU and under 4GB of memory you don't need a dedicated server. Buy a VM from one of these companies:

    * RamNode (8GB SVZS) $28 [Fully SSD storage, very fast network]
    * OVH (VPS CLOUD RAM 2) $22.39 [12GB(!) of ram and 2 vCores]
    * Linode (Linode 4GB) $20

These are all VPSs but they will get the job done and are cheap enough that you can build something great on a budget.

This is just from a few minutes of remembering when I had to buy my own hardware. I'm sure this isn't an exhaustive list. You can usually find information on the web hosting talk forums and on a site called low end box. I don't have links on hand but they're worth a read.

Most of those providers you mentioned aren't as reliable and scalable as AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, etc. That isn't an apples to apples comparison.

I would not want to host my business on So You Start, Kimsufi, Hetzner, and especially not Joe's Data Center. I have personally used Joes DC and they have had numerous outages in the past. Hetzner is known for terminating you for any sort of "DOS" like traffic, including high PPS. To add to that, those providers (except maybe OVH?) don't let you scale up and down with automated APIs.

I think that:

1) Most problems can, but shouldn't necessarily be, solved with adding more servers.

2) SYS & Kimsufi are just OVH resellers. Same datacenters just the last generation of hardware under a different brand.

3) Hetzner is great for if you want to serve up content from the EU. Great ping times all across there. (Your friends over the pond will thank you)

4) OVH is a huge, and very reliable, hosting company. I don't think there's anything wrong with them. They also do supply such an auto-scaling API.

5) You don't necesarily need to run mission-critical systems on a traditional hosting solution to see big savings. Move your high-compute/high-bandwith programs onto a dedicated server and save big. This is really great for batch analytics type systems where after a day of operation, you dump a backup file and want to pull some data out of it for the morning. It's great for dev systems and thousands of other non-mission-critical systems.

Reliability wise, do you actually use these services, as in my experience that's a complete myth.

One of my clients on a dedicated server has never gone down. The site is blazingly fast, barely touches 5% CPU and pages have sub 50ms response times. Deploys take 10 seconds or so, I could make it faster but it's not really worth the cost/benefit.

My client on Azure, with a significantly lower visitor count, pays 3-10 times as much, the site is sluggish, takes a long a time to spin up after deploys, hangs ocassionally, we've caught the whole site being offline a couple of times then it mysteriously starts working again with nothing in the logs, had a deploy to one site take down other sites and on top of that there's a 3-5ms delay between the database and website which causes all sorts of performance problems when a page makes too many DB requests.

They've had to "scale up" to premium database in the past to handle loads I know a much cheaper dedicated server would have handled without even thinking about it.

On top of that, Azure's management portal is super slow, regularly fails to execute commands and is incredibly frustrating to navigate and use.

The claimed machine you get on cloud aren't anything like as performant as supposedly similar machines on dedicated.

I'll admit I've generally found AWS to be significantly better than Azure, but still very expensive.

And AWS went down a couple of weeks ago too.

> on top of that there's a 3-5ms delay between the database and website which causes all sorts of performance problems

Yea that's something I don't get too. With all of that IPC going over amazon's network for all of their services how much time are programs wasting sending and waiting for messages from other amazon services?

I never really thought about that. If someone could measure this it would be interesting.

I can't comment on Azure, but most of the complaints about networking issues in AWS went away when they redesigned their networks around an SDN model with VPC. We see consistent <1ms RTTs within region, and <300µs within availability zone (datacenter).

I've got a reply from Google Compute before after complaining about how bad Azure was saying they'd has similar problems but solved the latency between servers and databases. It basically just sounds like the Azure guys have severely mucked up their infrastructure.

We have a test page that runs 100 "SELECT 1" SQL queries ON THE SAME CONNECTION between an Azure website and an Azure database and it takes a whopping 250ms to complete at best. That's literally all it does. And their infrastructure is so bad that it'll vary from 250ms to 600ms in the space of 20 seconds in peak periods. That's damning, cloud infrastructures are there to part you from your cash, nothing more.

It's ridiculously bad, in my opinion no professional should EVER recommend Azure. My client is enamoured with telling people the system runs on Azure, with its "secure" network, nothing I've told him makes a difference, but he'd have a much better service if he moved it off Azure.

Because we develop with the entity framework it's quite easy to muck up and forget an include or two and then suddenly the queries spawn a hundred or two hundred basic SELECT queries to populate a `Order.OrderItem` or something as trivial. On a standard dedicated server setup or even your worst 5 year-old crappy dev laptop that's a ms or 2 extra, but on Azure it's performance death.

There are advantages to using Azure, I admit, the easy deploy from github for example, but that's more because setting up deploying from a repo to IIS is such a bad workflow at the moment and the IIS management too. They don't want to make it easy. With other clients I've setup moderately complicated deployment scripts, and once the initial work is done, it's much better than Azure, you run a bat, boom, deploy much faster than Azure manages. 10-20 seconds without even pre-compiling the pages, Azure will take 5 or 10 minutes to finally get round to doing it and woe betide you doing it at peak times as it will use up your memory allocation and simply hang for 20 minutes while you frantically try and restart it while the azure management portal has a massive spaz (yes, we unfortunately deployed a serious bug, fixed it, tried to re-deploy while under heavy load, cue website down for a ridiculous amount of time while their management portal threw a ton of weird and inscrutable errors before we finally managed to restart it).

Yikes. I've only really had true production experience with AWS. I guess all clouds aren't made the same.

> One of my clients on a dedicated server has never gone down. The site is blazingly fast, barely touches 5% CPU and pages have sub 50ms response times. Deploys take 10 seconds or so, I could make it faster but it's not really worth the cost/benefit.

One of your clients... where? Without even giving a location, this doesn't even qualify as 'anecdata'.

I have used AWS at a couple work places and I personally use Google App Engine. My sites on App Engine have less than 5 minutes of downtime per year as measured by Pingdom. Deploys to App Engine take a few seconds (though it can depend on your app).

You can choose to run your DB servers on top of generic compute instances in Azure or any other cloud provider. You aren't stuck using their database services.

> The claimed machine you get on cloud aren't anything like as performant as supposedly similar machines on dedicated.

This is true, I don't think anyone will dispute that.

AWS is so much more than servers. If you just want a server to run some stuff on, you're right, it's faster and cheaper to buy a dedicated server from a reseller.

With Amazon you have so many options when it comes to storage, compute power, load balancing... They have a huge portfolio of products and you can get everything in one location from one vendor.

"With Amazon you have so many options when it comes to storage, compute power, load balancing..."

It used to be different, but today their most important offerings have open source equivalents. They are essentially off the shelf, because for your own projects there is no need to care about abuse or noisy neighbors. Most importantly, though, it's going to be cheaper and you still will be able to use cloud where it shines.

> It used to be different, but today their most important offerings have open source equivalents.

Seriously? What about S3, RDS, VPC, IAM? The engineering $$$ (in time) to set up and maintain open source equivalents of these would not be cheap.

AWS isnt cheap either

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