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Comment by dotancohen | Hacker News Reader

I disagree. I use my AWS EC2 instance as a VPS. For the money I get terrific customer support, access and integration with a tons of other useful services (RDS, S3), shared billing with my Glacier backups, and experience with a technology that employers value. I'm very happy, especially with the customer service.

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If you use low bandwidth, EC2 is reasonably priced compared to cheaper alternatives such as Linode, DO, etc.

If you use a fair amount of bandwidth, AWS is outright a scam.

Of course bare metal is much cheaper.

In my previous job (gaming), colocation was literally 20x cheaper than using AWS EC2.

Good point. As a server mostly for myself (but also hosting a few low-bandwidth sites such as my personal site), bandwidth is minuscule. I should have clarified that.

It just makes no sense to use AWS. You sleep better knowing there aren't extra charges you can't expect on sudden egress traffic rise by choosing sane providers.

The only place it's good for is for backups where traffic is almost one way.

Does a VPS really have that high of a customer service requirement for that to be the primary purchasing criteria?

Besides, there are plenty of VPS providers with excellent customer service.

It does when my credit card was cancelled, and AWS deferred payment for three months. I doubt that many other providers would have been so understanding and so generous.

Other providers solve this by providing multiple payment options than just "cards".

Without a working credit card for three months, I would have been unable to begin the process of another payment option.

And it's not specifically the "I didn't have a card" problem that was solved. It was the far more general "I had an issue that required human intervention and sacrifice on behalf of the provider", which was resolved. I can think of zero other tech giants with that level of service.

Maybe HN doesn't need all of that? Where/how HN is hosted is the least interesting thing about the orange site IMO.

True, but then lots of tech nerds are on here who like to look behind the scenes

Many other providers offer the useful services you'd ever need for a smaller company (Linode for example also offers managed databases and object stores) at a fraction of the cost.

You probably also don't have the amount of egress traffic that HN does.

Yes, I'm sure that for HN bandwidth is one of the most important factors. For myself it's almost an afterthought. And bandwidth is a critical fulcrum for cloud pricing comparisons.

HN can't have that much egress traffic

Even if you have 100,000 simultaneous users egressing 10k/minute (which seem implausibly high, but usable for a quick approximation), you're only looking at 40 TB/mo

And that has to be off by at least an order of magnitude (if not 2 or three)

There's no reason, from a bandwidth perspective, you can't host HN on $100 worth of DO droplets and some Object storage/hosted db

If HN cost even $500/mo in hosting, I'd be quite surprised

terramex[0] posted[1] this link - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28479595 wherein dang[2] links to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16076041, itself a comment from sctb[3] saying they're running 4M requests a day from a Xeon E5-2637 running FreeBSD with mirrored SSD for the site, and mirrored spinny for logs

That post doesn't say how much memory they were running in 2018 (I'll guess 32G, which is probably about right for a dual-core CPU or that era[4]), but an as-close-to-similarly-specced phsyical box from Hetzner[5] (6 core, 64G RAM, mirrored 1TB NVMe, mirrored 2TB spinny) is currently € 64.26 per month (68+change in Germany vs Finland) with 20TB transfer per month (if you add-on the 10G uplink, unlimited (within fair use policies) on the 1gbit connection)

With 4M requests/day (let's even triple that to 12M/day now), at 10k per request (a ridiculously high guess, I'm sure), that's only 40-120GB/day tops in egressed data (or 1.2-36TB per month)

HN's a pretty cheap thing to run, as far as hardware and hosting is concerned :)

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[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=terramex

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32466789

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=sctb

[4] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/64598/i...

[5] https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ax51-nvme/confi...

What do you use customer support for? Do you have that much trouble?

This isn't really a debate is it ? You like it for reasons other than value. OK, but its more expensive than other vps providers.

Customer service : if you need to use cusomter service something has gone wrong, and I literally move provider.

I shudder to think that there are people that would use the word cheap and RDS in the same sentence.

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