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Comment by blowski | Hacker News Reader

I recently moved a smallish business application from two bare-metal servers onto Azure VMs. It's a standard PHP 7.4 application, MySQL, Redis, nginx. Despite the VMs costing more and having twice the spec of the bare-metal servers, it has consistently performed slower and less reliably throughout the stack. The client's budget is too small to spend much time looking into it. Instead, they upped the spec even further, and what used to cost £600 per month now costs £2000.

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(Disclaimer) As a bare metal provider, I hope more people become aware what I've been saying for years: cloud is great for scaling down, but not that great for scaling up. If you want to have lots of VM's that don't warrant their own hardware that you can conveniently turn up and down, then cloud is fantastic. If you have a big application that needs to scale, you can get further vertically with bare metal, and if you need to scale horizontally, you need to optimize better higher up in the stack anyway, and the much lower cost for equivalent resources (without even taking any virtualization performance hit into account), more flexibility and thus more/better fitted performance of bare metal should have the clear advantage.

FYI I clicked on “get a dedicated server” on your site and ended up getting a 404

https://astuteinternet.com/services/dedicated-servers-order

{"error":"URI Not Found"}

>Starting at $199/mo

Sounds pricey :)

Canadian dollars, so ~$160 USD. But that's still extremely high for a quad-core CPU from 2013, 8 GB RAM, no solid-state storage, and capped bandwidth.

Sorry, the website is pretty outdated. We're almost exclusively rolling out AMD EPYC3's these days, and we'd price any of those older configurations much lower than what the website lists them at. Nobody, other than spammers, ever orders through our website (although to be fair, our website may be to blame for that also). We get all of our business through word of mouth, and keep busy enough on that alone, so the website hasn't been a priority.

You really ought to take your price lists down if they're that out of date. As it stands, they're probably driving some potential customers away -- even ones who heard of you through word of mouth, but decided to do a bit of research before proceeding.

Not really.

Before there was a "cloud" in the early 2000s, we were paying anywhere from $100 (cheap, low spec machines) to $199 (new hardware, more ram, faster disks) per month for rented bare metal from places like Servermatrix, Softlayer, etc.

The going rate also typically included anywhere from 1TB to 2TB of egress, as well.

Another way of looking at it for the low end: How many things do you run on a single bare metal host versus an equivalent amount of discrete "services"?

Look at Hetzner / OVH. I got incredibly good deals from them on dedicated servers. I think I am paying around $150 Canadian for AMD 16 cores, 128GB ECC RAM, do not remember storage.

Updated: I also run some things right from my home office since I have symmetric 1Gbps fiber. For that I paid around $4000 Cdn for off lease 20 core 3.4GHz 512GB RAM server from HP

From our experience, if we price too low we get people who expect the world for bottom dollar. $199 is more the minimum price point at which we’re generally willing to take someone on a customer, than a reflection of the price of a base configuration server. Anyone e-mailing us for a quote, if they seem like they’re on the up and up and we like what they're about, we will usually give a pretty good discount. Most business nowadays are for people ordering several servers at a time and they will always request a custom quotation anyhow, and we're pretty aggressive with larger volume orders.

> what I've been saying for years: cloud is great for scaling down, but not that great for scaling up.

Yes and no. The cloud isn’t cheap at running any lift and shift type project. Where the cloud comes into its own is serverless and SaaS. If you have an application that’s a typical VM farm and you want to host it in the cloud, then you should at least first pause and identify how, if at all, your application can be re-architected to be more “cloudy”. Not doing this is usually the first mistake people make when deploying to the cloud.

I think “the cloud” never claimed to be cheaper, though. Its promise is mainly that you’ll offset a lot of risks with it against a higher price. And of course the workflow with the cloud is very different, with virtual machine images and whatnot.

Whether that’s worth the price is up debate, though. I hope we’ll get more mature bare metal management software, perhaps even standardized in some remote management hardware so you can flash entire bare metal systems.

Right now I’m mostly running Debian stable and everything inside Docker on the host machine, making it effectively a Docker “hypervisor”. It can get you quite far, without leaking any application state to the host machine.

Oh I agree, it is easier to mitigate some risks in a cloud solution. But this client - and they’re not unusual in their thinking - believes the cloud is somehow automatically mitigating those risks, when in fact it’s doing nothing because they’re not paying for it.

Did you throw money at the storage layer? The IOs are ridiculously slow by default.

The clock is ticking on PHP 7.4 security support, one year left:

https://www.php.net/supported-versions

Try Google Cloud instead. I've used both Azure and GCP and Azure VMs always feel sluggish, a problem I don't have with GCP.

In this specific case, they chose Azure. They had a consultant in a fancy suit tell them Azure would be safer, and proposed an architecture that ended up not working at all. But they still went with Azure, and it’s difficult to point to any gains they’ve got for the 200% price increase.

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