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Comment by chx | Hacker News Reader

Note 512GB RAM costing 433.00 EUR a month (500 USD). Reminder: https://twitter.com/garybernhardt/status/600783770925420546

> Consulting service: you bring your big data problems to me, I say "your data set fits in RAM", you pay me $10,000 for saving you $500,000.

Previously, the cheapest such server was 700 USD at OVH and it only included half this much of NVMe SSD.

Also, I gave a talk years ago at NYCCamp trying to hammer in that most websites do not need all the scalability tricks as they fit into a single server. Well, this server can happily house a 7TB database on mirrored SSDs and that's still below 500 EUR (with "only" 128GB of RAM). You need to think very hard whether you need to shard, cluster etc.

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You'll never get funding with that pitch, though. Hyper-modular microservice blockchain bus is what investors want to hear.

They read on the internet that the only way to survive FB levels of users is webscaling, and they won't make a bet unless they think you'll be FB sized in three years.

But what if you call it NoScale™?

I am usually consulting for established companies with what they perceive as scalability problems but too often turns out to be a performance one.

That makes complete sense, tell me more. When you show them that there are enormous optimizations that they could be doing, what do they say?

Nothing. That's the end goal. My team is hired to make their website fast. Unless we recommend a total hosting change which is rare (but it exists) there's little involvement necessary from the client and it's usually in making the necessary compromises. Like, your posts will take two minutes to be searchable but in turn your search will become 400 times faster. Is this acceptable?

Though it may be heretical to say so in the valley, you know it is possible to grow a business without funding, right?

In the valley you go can grow funding w/o having a business.

Your consulting advice will give you cold looks from those whose living depends on selling people complex server/"cloud" configurations under fancy names.

I am just channeling Gary Bernhardt who is the best. He also tweeted at one point that we will oil snakes into extinction.

well you need to pay at least 20€ per Server per Month (15 € Flexi-Pack 5€ second Nic) for a private LAN. (excluding the needed switch/switches for HA, I guess they are somwhere around 20-40€ per switch depending on if HA or not)

Isn't it cheaper to buy the server with that much RAM and colocate?

This one is under $2K:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/172727384582

I’ve colocated servers for a long time and even though it’s counterintuitive, the price of power+kvm+bandwidth+rackspace is rarely less than the price of a managed dedicated server in the same data center.

Colocation is horror. You are responsible for replacing the HW if the magic smoke gets released. Nah. Just rent it. Not to mention capex vs opex.

Don't forget to add two 960GB U.2 NVMe drives. Those are expensive. For eg https://www.neweggbusiness.com/product/product.aspx?item=9b-... $831.60 apiece. Doubles the server price. Oh I forgot you picked a server which doesn't have hotswap NVMe bays...

Also that CPU is old and slow. It is the one before Sandy Bridge. I can't find the EPYC chip on the spec site but a roughly comparable Xeon:

Old: https://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/res2011q2/cpu2006-20110...

New: https://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/res2017q3/cpu2006-20170...

(yes, the latter is 2P so you'd need to halve it, it's still twice as fast)

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