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Comment by warent | Hacker News Reader

Switched from GCP to my own server hardware. After doing the math it came out that it would pay for itself in less than a year. Depending on individual usecase, cloud can be prohibitively expensive and running a server for a small business really isn't nearly as hard as they'd have you believe

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Cloud isn't about cost though. Cloud is about value. You can scale super easy when you inevitably need it (assuming you've "made it" anyway - whatever that means). You get a burst of new users, it's trivial to add additional nodes (again, assuming you've set up your infra to be easily scalable).

With own hardware, scaling is not as easy. You'll have to do a lot more around plumbing too. Networking, security, many other things that you'll have to address. Stuff that has already been solved for you.

That "inevitably" is doing some really heavy lifting in your post. It practically never comes for most companies.

But most companies' dream is to reach that ""inevitable"" point where the cloud saves it; it becomes a bet where they either reach that level of scale, or die trying.

> But most companies' dream is to reach that ""inevitable"" point where the cloud saves it; it becomes a bet where they either reach that level of scale, or die trying.

And how many die trying due to bleeding all the funding to AWS, instead of running everything off a couple cheap boxes underneath the CTOs desk? I've been in at least one which ran out of money that way.

Don't pay for the future pipedream now, pay for what you need. That "inevitable" dream of near-infinite scale up usually never arrives for most companies. If it does, worry about it then.

AWS gives away literally tens of thousands of pounds to start ups. Granted, it's to lock them in down the line but getting free credits gets you further than not having credits.

AWS credits are a toxic trap. BTDT. They'll get you far enough that you are hopefully (from AWS perspective) locked in pretty tight. And then the high monthly costs start to hit you hard.

Sure, that's true. But I've been in companies where they've had major investments and have a pretty significant number of users, and they still had stupid amounts of credits. One of my previous companies was running a third of their infra on AWS credits, and they still long runway in terms of free credits.

Meanwhile, they had to shake off a £1 million a year contract for the next 5 years for 2 DCs. With AWS they were using less than half of that per year (this includes the credits they had). But even if it wasn't cheaper, requesting a new server took days, not minutes. Scaling was not possible. I'll take the credit and potentially get trapped than having to deal with an inflexible mess that is in-house managed infrastructure.

At least bigger orgs are able to afford it by (hopefully) building a cloud on top of their infrastructure, but outside that, the majority should of companies be looking into the cloud. Whether that be AWS, GCP, or the smaller Clouds like DO, it doesn't matter.

> But I've been in companies where they've had major investments and have a pretty significant number of users, and they still had stupid amounts of credits.

Your companies have been wiser and more frugal than mine!

In every case, I've seen the credits run out before there was a penny of revenue coming in.

Surely if they are that succesfull, they also have the resources to redesign/upgrade their backend?

Yes, but what about the million new customers you're going to get next week?

Having plans for what to do in case of a success disaster is good. Spending in expectation of having a success disaster can be disastrous.

Funny, but honestly, a single dedicated server should easily be able to handle a million users, for most CRUD apps.

The cloud has normalized terrible underpowered VMs, so many new developers may just not be aware of how much performance a real dedicated machine has - even a relatively "mid range" one (i7 & 16 GB RAM).

This! I benchmarked a whole bunch of different cloud providers for fun (& my bachelor thesis) and was impressed by how bad some cloud VPS perform. Considering the really steep price to get any kind of significant memory/CPU resources with the major cloud providers as well as the steep bandwidth charges this little experiment was eye opening

Could you please share your thesis? Maybe over email?

I appreciate the interest, unfortunately I can’t share as it is under a non disclosure. But since there seems to be so much interest in the benchmark part I will see if I finde the time to re compile the data and publish it as a blogpost

Would be very interested in reading this thesis, my email is in my profile

I'd be interested as well.

> The cloud has normalized terrible underpowered VMs, so many new developers may just not be aware of how much performance a real dedicated machine has

This. I'm now seeing many younger developers with no exposure at all to hardware servers, only underpowered cloud VMs.

Not sure how to solve this, but I certainly enourage everyone to spend time now and then benchmarking cloud setup vs. local hardware to at least understand the performance spread and cost tradeoffs you're making.

I've seen too many setups paying 4 and even 5 digit US$ monthly bills to AWS, for workloads that could have been served off a single $1000 box without it breaking a sweat.

Funnily enough that was a use case for dedicated servers I encountered. Usage based pay is great if you have an unlimited budget, but most companies would rather have predictable cost and not serve every traffic spike.

Especially for internal use (CI/CD, Analytics), you'd rather want to queue a few things up than always having to consider your budget when you want to run something.

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