Comment by LogicX | Hacker News Reader

Comment by LogicX | Hacker News Reader

Just to be clear, this would be more appropriately titled How we saved money moving from AWS to VPS providers.

It comes as little surprise to me that the AWS lightsail offering saved them money over traditional AWS services, just as they’d save even more using two dedicated servers with any reasonable provider and being able to have a hot-failover for everything.

At DNSFilter we’ve gone through the evolution of Heroku -> AWS -> VPSs -> Dedicated -> and now are setting up our first colo rack.

I did a price comparison recently between Dedicated, AWS, and Colo. Dedicated is 15% the cost of AWS for our needs, and colo will be 42% the cost of Dedicated for us.

Now keep in mind we have dedicated DevOps staff and are running at a very different scale from OP, and such a solution is not for everyone. But I personally have never understood the folks who love to brag about having spent much time and effort optimizing AWS to spin up and spin things down, when for the same cost I could just have a 10x more powerful server sitting there, on all the time to handle a spike in load, and I can utilize the extra resources or get things done faster with faster gear at 1/10th the price.

In the end, the most optimized way to save AWS cost is to call the AWS sales guy for lunch.

I don't ask for anything but usually 2-3 days after that he'd call to inform that I got a few thousands of AWS credit.

100% agreed. I always cringe when I see some hot new startup going all out on AWS or other cloud services when a $60/mo dedicated box would have more than covered their needs. No point spending that money until they actually need to worry about scaling, and even then, the value of dedicated servers / colo is so much better if you have the staff to support it. I manage a top 2k site off of some OVH boxes and our bandwidth alone at any of the major cloud providers would be many multiples of our monthly bill.

Lots of startups need to worry about scaling pretty early on. I see the HN attitude a lot of "You aren't Google so don't bother with scale until later" but a lot of interesting problems require scale extremely early.

Would you mind sharing any of your experiences with OVH that you’re able to? I’ve used them before for hobby projects but was always worried about reliability for anything more serious. Had also heard questionable things about their networking reliability. Anything related to roughly how many machines you run, types, problems encountered, etc would be super helpful. Thanks!

I actually had similar concerns, in my mind OVH was always one of the lesser regarded providers with cheap hardware and attracted not-so-nice customers judging by the amount of spam I used to get from their network.

I ended up moving my personal projects to OVH as a trial (and due to some some gross incompetence by Singlehop). After a few months of everything looking great, I moved our company's production services and couldn't be happier. I now consider them one of my tier one options when looking for hosting options. The hardware on the higher end models is all enterprise grade - Xeon, ECC, enterprise SSD / NVME drives, etc. You also get full IPMI access with virtual media, so setting up full disk encryption etc is a breeze. Network has been very reliable, their DDoS protection in particular is almost magical - I barely even see the malicious traffic before their network filters it. I only have a handful of servers, but none of them have experienced any hardware or major network issues. Currently have servers in their Vint Hill, Beauharnois and Roubaix datacenters and it all seems to be equally reliable.

The value-add features like FTP backup space haven't been great, speed / reliability problems but I don't care too much for it anyway, I ended up using Hetzner for backup storage as they have a ridiculously good $/GB ratio. I can't speak much for OVH support as I've rarely had to contact them, the few times I did they resolved the problem satisfactorily. With IPMI access and being an unmanaged service, you're probably on your own for anything software related.

Awesome, thanks so much for the info. Glad to hear it's a viable option since the hardware prices always seemed great and the unlimited bandwidth would be key for certain applications too.

> two dedicated servers with any reasonable provider and being able to have a hot-failover for everything.

Except you have to implement that hot failover yourself, rather than using something like EC2 auto-scaling groups or an RDS multi-AZ deployment. I'm not confident that I'd get it right, and the middle of a night is a hell of a time to discover that you got it wrong.

How much uptime do you need, and how much does EC2 provide? Things will depend on that.

But from what I've seen, the point may be moot. Odds are that the EC2 uptime is around the same as you'll get on a single machine VPS anywhere anyway.

> RDS multi-zone AZ deployment

I don't know about all RDBMS brands, but if you're running Postgres then setting up a read-only slave is trivially simple. You run one command to promote it to master.

At my work we use both AWS and colo our own gear in two geographically isolated datacenters. We use AWS for highly specialized tasks (e.g., Lex) and our colocated servers for just about everything else. The savings have been tremendous -- our costs would be ~10x higher if everything was on AWS.

I think a lot of people forget just how cost-effective dedicated servers and colocation can be. If you're not allergic to dealing with the occasional hardware failure, then there's no question in my mind that it's the right way to go.

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