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Comment by jayski | Hacker News Reader

100% agree.

AWS is very cost efficient for other services (S3,SES,SQS, etc) but virtual machines are not a good deal. You get less RAM & CPU, with the virtualization overhead, and pay a lot more money.

Especially for Postgres if you run some tests with pgbench you can really see the penalty you pay for virtualization.

Maybe the sysadmin skill of being able to build your own infrastructure is becoming a lost art, otherwise I can't explain why people are so in love with paying 5x for less performance.

Hetzner is cheap and reliable in Europe, if you're in North America take a look at OVH. Especially their cost-saving alternative called SoYouStart. You can get 4/8 4.5ghz, 64 RAM and an NVME drive for $65.

(I have no affiliation with OVH, I'm just a customer with almost 100 servers, and it's worked out great for me)

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AWS’s value proposition is dead simple to understand if you’ve actually used it. You said it yourself. AWS gets you through the door with their managed services, meta components (like billing and IAM), and whatever else. Saying even in a tongue in cheek way that people are in love with paying more for less raw power isn’t giving people enough credit. I know I could get a better cost per hertz elsewhere, or whatever. That’s not the whole equation.

Yeah, raw compute is only one of many things I need to optimize for now. For many use cases compute is a solved problem. What I do think about is ease of backups, restores, ability for multi-region, scaling, deploys, then the many other services I don't need to build and maintain. If my problem was compute constrained then sure, back to metal. Or, if my business is so big I can handle the cost, yeah run my own DCs.

I'll also note that I'm old hehe, and one of my first jobs we had a decent sized data center on site. Dealing with SANs, tape drives (auto tape rotators at the time were garbage), servers, etc... was a huge PITA. Packing up tapes and shipping them to another office for location redundancy was always fun.

I understand what you're saying. It might come down to use-case.

The particular application I manage really suffers from low GHz and not having all data in memory. Ive run the benchmarks on EC2, certain reports that finish in ~5 seconds can take more than a minute on a comparable EC2 instance that costs about 10x as much. This application really needs the raw CPU. and yes we have a pretty large engineering team that has optimized all the queries, índices etc.

As far as replication, backups, etc. I set all that up, and honestly it wasn't a big deal. It's a couple short chapters in the Postgres book that explain it all very simply, how to configure, continuously (and automatically) test, etc.

I do agree that SANs are a nightmare. Thats why I ship all my WALs (PG backup files) to S3 (and eventually Glacier). That way I don't have to think about losing those files and it's dirt cheap.

I think there's a misconception that these kinds of configurations are too complicated for a single engineer to setup, with never ending maintenance required. In reality you can set it all up in less than a week and it only really needs maintenance when you want to upgrade Postgres (some settings may have changed). I'd estimate it takes about 5 hours per year of maintenance.

I'm not sure if cloud has a valid value-proposition. The more I explore and build the more irrelevant it seems for the average developer. Besides price and performance being obvious concerns, it's also a platform. Working with it fundamentally ties your business to a set of products. Historically, this hasn't worked well for Internet businesses. Plus, all the benefits of cloud can be mirrored by traditional servers.

Self-serve infrastructure appears likely to become increasingly viable as we continue improving last mile delivery and expand fiber access. Will cloud become self-cannibalizing? Definitely maybe.

That could have been true if the industry had not screwed up IPv6 and security so badly that it's actually rare for even good internet connections to expose their end users to full inbound internet traffic so it's actually harder to self host out of your basement today then it was 20 years ago because of the prevalence of ISP supplied hardware firewalls for todays consumer internet.

What cloud gets you is the ability to put your data/workload right at the core without having to make special deals with your local isp, and with a lot more resilience then you would likely afford unless your at least at the multiple 20 foot container full of servers scale of compute need.

It's not an issue anymore. Your main concerns are power and internet stability. Plus, upload speed. The rest can be worked out.

https://www.cloudflare.com/products/tunnel/

https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflared

https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/connections...

Edit: If anyone is interested in self-hosting, it's stupid simple with cloudflared. I have a 2017 Google Pixelbook running Ubuntu on custom firmware that's serving a Flask-based website. It sits on my desk charging while connected to a guest wifi network. It receives a 100/100 Mobile PageSpeed score and takes 0.8 seconds to fully load.

I'd be interested in browsing the site for myself if you're willing to link to it.

I'm interested if there were any such providers in East Asia(Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, etc.)

From what I've been able to find, the kind of pricing OP is talking about for a dedicated server is only available in Europe and possibly even only through one provider (Hetzner). I looked around and could only find dedicated servers in Asia that were pretty much the same specs as what I'm getting for a similar price from DigitalOcean (for a Singapore VPS), except coming from shady looking companies with bad websites filled with flashing ads.

From DO I get all the benefits of a reliable company, scalability, automated backups etc etc. There's no way I'd change.

> Hetzner is cheap and reliable in Europe

Hetzner cloud now has two US locations... Still no US dedicated servers though - those would kick real ass. Even if their current cloud offerings themselves are already ~30% of the price of the major cloud equivalents...

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