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Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

This right here

I always hear people on the internet talking about AWS being crazy expensive, but from SFBA it looks really damn cheap. Would I rather give $thousands to AWS or $hundredthousands to an internal specialist who’s likely gonna say my company is too small and boring to keep them interested anyway?

AWS wind that math every day. And that’s the market they target. Why wouldnt they?

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AWS is extremely expensive once you get to any meaningful size. If you save on infrastructure you pay for it on enterprise support, engineers or consultants and/or bandwidth.

I LIKE AWS. I think it can be a great choice for many companies and use-cases. But the idea that AWS is firmly everyone, that it's less expensive for everyone when you factor in the TCO, simply isnt correct.

This just isn't true, in fact quite the opposite. If you just have a website you are working on aws is complex and expensive. When you need to handle it at scale then AWS is far better than other clouds and an order of magnitude cheaper than rolling your own racks.

> But the idea that AWS is firmly everyone, that it's less expensive for everyone when you factor in the TCO, simply isnt correct.

Correct. I specifically said it’s perfect if your labor cost is higher than your AWS cost

Another good case is indie hackers whose project likely won’t ever make it out of the free tier

What's meaningful? It'll cost you a half million to build a full rack, power it and give it connectivity for a year. That's a lot of spot instances if you don't have a constant load

> It'll cost you a half million to build a full rack, power it and give it connectivity for a year.

For $1500/mo you can get half rack (5Kv) and 50 Mbps internet. A couple $5k switches and 6-8 10k servers and you're well under $125k, plus you probably don't need $10k servers or $5k switches and can find cheaper hosting. I realize you said a full rack, but that's probably overkill and could be done for $350k or less. Once you have the servers/switches your fixed costs are relatively low.

Part of it is that people see the AWS or support bill or consultant bill or whatever. But they don't really see the cost of DIY whether initial cost or ongoing support. The cost of build (on many dimensions) vs. buy is often underestimated. That's not to say you should never build--no, you shouldn't use AWS for everything--but it's important to understand the real costs.

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