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Comment by jenscow | Hacker News Reader

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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