> It cost less than $2K/Month.
The solution in this article is serving on the order of 100TB/month for $400/month including a high speed global CDN, their API and database servers being hosted reliably, and redundancy and backup being handled by someone else.
Your solution is hosting on the order of 1000s of TBs of month (ignoring the database and other aspects of this website), but the price is an order of magnitude higher. You’ve also given up all of the automatic redundancy and hands-off management, and you don’t have the benefit of a high speed global CDN.
But more importantly, you have significantly higher engineering and on-call overhead, which you’re valuing at $0.
If anything, that only makes Polyhaven’s solution sound more impressive.
> Of course, for this price, you don't have redundancy and horizontal scaling.
Which is a huge caveat. The global CDN makes a big difference in how the site loads in global locations. Maybe not a big concern if you’re serving of static files with a lot of buffering, but they have a dynamic website and a global audience and they said fast load times are important.
> You also don't have to maintain and debug a system with redundancy and horizontal scaling.
But you have to do literally everything else manually and maintain it yourself, which is far from free.
All of these alternative proposals that value engineering time at $0/hour and assume your engineers are happy to be on-call 24/7 to maintain these servers are missing the point. You pay for turnkey solutions so you don’t have to deal with as much. Engineers don’t actually love to respond to on call events. If you can offload many of your problems to a cloud provider and free up your engineers for a nominal cost, do it.