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Comment by bearjaws | Hacker News Reader

I work in a start up, we own all our own hardware, and it is HELL.

We are forced to pay extremely large sums of money to upgrade our infrastructure as any purchase requires a redundant piece as well.

For example we have used 90% of our SANs storage, our IO is suffering and now were looking at purchasing two $10k SANs to upgrade. In the meantime, we have probably spent over 10k worth of development time to compress, clean up, and remove any data we don't need. We will not get the weeks of development effort back, we will continue to spend more money on hardware, and we will continue to suffer to delay projects because of poor choices.

If we had AWS, we could have written an entire sprints worth of work (also ~$14k worth of IT time) and moved on with our lives.

Clearly, some companies let the budget keep growing, but for most companies AWS flexibility is worth its weight in gold.

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Why is it always colo vs cloud in these arguments? What about renting everything monthly from ovh, rackspace, softlayer etc? Many of them can provision dedicated servers within minutes, too.

Also some combination of cloud and private servers. If I was starting up a Netflix competitor for instance, the site could probably run fine from owned hardware, but the content itself would be better off being cloud based.

Ironically netflix does the exact opposite. Also, you definitely don't want to have the content on the cloud - the data transfer pricing is where they make significant profit. Both AWS and GCE are ~$100/TB outgoing.

AWS provides a SAN in the form of EBS.

Colocation provides a SAN in the form of calling up a datacenter storage company and having some consultants install you a SAN.

What are you going to do to get similar functionality on OVH, Rackspace, or Softlayer?

I have the opposite experience. We have a quite storage-heavy service (video delivery, multiple versions of each), and we recently had to upgrade our SAN to a) a newer system and b) more capacity.

As part of this process, we looked into AWS and similar products, and with a naive 1:1 move it would be 3 times more expensive than getting a hardware deal with ramp-up (make a deal for X, buy 20% * X upfront, then buy the rest as needed). Implement some better scaling up and down might have decreased the cost to only a 2x multiplier.

Having your own hardware is not a walk in the part, and you need at least one experienced sysadmin to help with server setup, but I feel that for a steady company the cost benefit alone is worth it. We still use a CDN on top of our setup to alleviate pressure to our servers, but otherwise everything runs on our own hardware.

>For example we have used 90% of our SANs storage, our IO is suffering and now were looking at purchasing two $10k SANs to upgrade. In the meantime, we have probably spent over 10k worth of development time to compress, clean up, and remove any data we don't need.

I suspect you haven't priced out AWS storage (and the bandwidth to actually access the data with frequency). If the cost of a SAN was hurting your company and you had to look to reduce data usage, AWS will absolutely wipe you out.

And how much would AWS cost for your total storage, per month? Because if that's $5k then it sounds like you still picked the cheaper route...

Exactly. Neither path is easy to walk; it always comes down to trade-offs. What do you value?

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