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Comment by josh_carterPDX | Hacker News Reader

I just joined a new company who is doing nothing but helping companies figure out how to save more money on their cloud costs. This is such a timely article.

The same costs that are being used to justify the value of the cloud are now being used to justify going back to buying servers. Which is the wrong solution, by the way.

With anything it just comes down to education and best practices. People need to utilize the incredible tools out there along with understanding better how the cost structures work.

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Servers the wrong solution? Maybe in a few situations. AWS is just too expensive.

Eg. 600 TB data out and 100 TB in is $37300 on AWS, and by going with colocation a price of < $500 is very achieveable.

That's ~1/75th of the cost!!!

There is nothing to understand here, except that AWS in insanely expensive and colocation is a way better option in this situation.

I agree that the price is high but you're not comparing the same things. Is the $500 a month DDOS protected bandwidth with as much redundancy as AWS is providing? I definitely shift as much bandwidth away from AWS as I can with any solution I make but they do provide more than a dumb pipe

Ditto. The other point to make here is that AWS is not the only game in town. I agree they're not an inexpensive option, but there are even some small "mom and pop" cloud providers that are cheaper and easier to use than AWS. However, until they stop gobbling up market share there will always be ancillary markets that will work to support those that invest in their services.

> Is the $500 a month DDOS protected bandwidth with as much redundancy as AWS is providing?

Sometimes you don't need that.

AWS S3 provides reduced-redundancy options for less cost. It'd be nice if the same applied to other services.

600 TB/month is an average of 1850 Mbps. Expect at least twice that sustained during business hours.

You're not gonna get a dedicated 10 Gbps link for a few hundreds bucks with a free server.

While that's true, other quality providers still smash AWS on that issue.

Let's say you spread that across 10 dedicated instances ("optimized droplets") on DigitalOcean, at a cost of $800. They account pool the droplet transfer, so that's 50tb with the instances. The remaining 550tb would cost you $5500.

$6,300 vs $37,300 and you get ten servers with DO.

And if you really wanted to be creative, spin up 100 $20 instances, which would cost you $2,000 and give you 400tb of pooled transfer. Then spin up the 10 $80 optimized droplets to use for actual work (maybe there would also be some use case for the 100 standard droplets with 2vCPUs and 4gb ram; otherwise idle them). That gets you down to $4,300, almost a tenth of what AWS is charging just for the transfer.

When it comes to transfer, AWS is a minimum of 5x more expensive than it should be even if you assume a premium for the service. It's a big fat money maker for them.

Agreed. The bandwidth is overpriced. None of this should be served from the cloud, but from a CDN instead.

That being said. I wouldn't try to push the limits of Digital Ocean too much. I have an ex coworker who looked into moving a compute grid to Digital Ocean, pinning a number of instances to full CPU, he quickly got contacted by support to stop before they shut down the account.

That's odd that he had the ability to max the cpu's in the first place right? Was he violating some terms or agreement?

Not at all. Just running a normal computing grid consuming any CPU resources that's available. It was for scientific simulations for a research center, think of something like weather forecast.

Clearly, Digital Ocean didn't want to serve that use case. They don't want customers to use all the resources that they are paying for. They're probably under provisioning power and cooling by a large factor.

Does their term tell you not to max on capacity?

Otherwise DO gets sued for unfairly threatening.

Or they thought he was running cryptocurrency mining and the bills might bounce.

Lightsail on AWS gives 1 TB of transfer on a $3.50 instance. $2,000/m would get you 571 TB/m :-)

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