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Comment by ggg9990 | Hacker News Reader

I use AWS and find that it is "cheap as fuck." The reason is that my product is very expensive per unit of compute used, so my infrastructure costs are less than 1% of my revenue. I compete on other things and had $35K revenue last year with 120GB transferred to customers and 7GB uploaded. If you have a photo storage or video sharing site you damn well better be competing on infrastructure costs and not using Amazon's premium infrastructure-in-a-box.

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That's how I feel. Cloud services are great for anything that isn't losing money on each customer and then trying to make it up in volume :).

Cloud is way more expensive than other options, but I'm serving 5,000 customers for less than $100 a month, so spending more time to get that price down is definitely not the best use of my time.

Is it? Cloud isn't apples to apples to other options because it covers both hardware and at least some if not most of your operations costs. The less magical your infrastructure, the more (very expensive) people are required to maintain it.

It really depends on your use case and requirements.

When you have a simple stack and reduced uptime requirements, getting something like 3 servers from a provider like Hetzner (https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-px) can give you a lote of compute power for little money.

Of course building something on top of GAE or AWS EBS / Lambda is a lot easier on the OPS side and gives you much more confidence, but at a much higher price.

Cloud is worth if you are in the range of $10-$200. Other that, there are better alternatives.

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