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Comment by rexreed | Hacker News Reader

In the post he mentions that he could use a simple $3/mo Lite VPS (or vms is what he says) for what he needs.... so why go all the way to AWS if you can use something lite? Why are things like DigitalOcean / Linode / Hetzner / OVS etc so discounted? (edit: discounted in terms of opinion, dismissed so easily, not discounted in price. Obviously they are cheaper)

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AWS/Azure/etc. are just not the place to get up a low cost personal server. I think the free tier confuses people into trying it, but ultimately what you get is a tiny VM with limited services that is designed for you to rapidly outgrow.

That's okay though, because that's not why the big clouds are valuable. I'm going to refer specifically to AWS, but I also include Azure, GCP, etc. AWS is not cheap. If you only need a single host, or a small fixed group of hosts, AWS is an expensive option with little to justify the added cost. What you're paying for with AWS isn't just the resources you use, but the resources AWS keeps available for use at a moment's notice. If you don't have that need to scale your resources up and down, the costs of using AWS become harder to justify.

If the goal is to do it on the cheap, a $5/mo vps is going to do better than the AWS free tier. If you need more power, the price gap between a bare metal private server and an equivalent AWS instance just gets bigger as the server gets more powerful.

AWS also provides lightsail which meets the $5/mo vps needs

They limit it so something like 20 machines max. After that you must use their other services, which are much more expensive

I use AWS to host a couple small personal instances. The key is to utilize reserve instances.

> Why are things like DigitalOcean / Linode / Hetzner / OVS etc so discounted?

AWS, Azure, GCP is premium.

I mean to say discounted in terms of opinion, not price. I know why they are cheaper. I'm just asking why people dismiss them so easily.

Because they are hosting services more than platforms

Here's a Hetzner DC:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eo8nz_niiM

Here's a GCP/Google DC:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kd33UVZhnAA

Not to speak of network/power redundancy, managed hardware (like not having to prove to your ISP that their memory or disk is broken!), lots of services besides just metal...

HN is actually really in love with putting things on Hetzner, OVH and co. It works and it's cheap. But it wouldn't be a good experience when things break, and you better have really good backups and plans to fail over to another box when something bad[1] happens.

[1]: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/ovh-fire-while-po...

That Google DC video doesn't actually show how the data center is setup or operates. It shows all the security layers to make people feel like their data is safe (from physical attacks, not cyberattacks of course). You see more about Google Data center hard disk shredders than you do how they manage and cool their servers. The differences are more about preventing humans from getting in and access to the machines. The actual racks, cooling, etc are pretty similar in many respects. There's more redundancy in Google data centers, theoretically. But the reality is not what it might seem in terms of actual data center resilience.

> Why are things like DigitalOcean / Linode / Hetzner / OVS etc so discounted? (edit: discounted in terms of opinion, dismissed so easily, not discounted in price. Obviously they are cheaper)

Because the value-add of SaaS is often worthwhile compared to roll-your-own (or some open source equivalent) on top of a self-administered server.

>DigitalOcean / Linode / Hetzner / OVS

Some people prefer to pay for providers whose datacenters have fire protection.

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/fire-destroys-ovh...

A single data center is not reliable. We all know in 2022 that having a backup offsite is important. No data center can offer 100% uptime in perpetuity.

Sure but the less reliable the more those data centers will be discounted in public opinion. Which is what OP asked about. Same reason AWS us-east-1 has a horrible reputation.

hetzner is not a datacenter, it is a closet with old hardware that for some reason is still powered on.

I know this is a joke but if you'd like to see inside their data center, there's a nice video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eo8nz_niiM

Lol, it’s insane that they offer cheap and somehow reliable cloud offerings though that whole companies rely on.

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