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Comment by nevi-me | Hacker News Reader

I was upset last week when I saw how much our managed Postgres service cost us at work. $800 for the month, it's storing around 32GB of data, and is allocated 4 CPU cores.

Like you, I also run my services from a rented physical server. I used to use Versaweb, but their machines are too old. I didn't previously like Hetzner because I'd heard bad things about them interfering with what you're running. However, I moved to them in December when my Versaweb instance just died, probably SSD from old age. I'm now paying 50% of what I paid Versaweb, and I can run 6 such Postgres instances.

Then it makes one wonder whether it's worth paying $700 of $800 for a managed service with a fancy cloud UI, automatic upgrades and backups, etc. For a 1 person show or small startup, I think not. Cheaper to use an available service and dump backups to S3 or something cheaper.

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$800 for the month, it's storing around 32GB of data, and is allocated 4 CPU cores.

Company I used to work for happily paid company A four times what company B charged for the exact same service, just because company A was willing to send quarterly invoices in way that played nicely with our invoicing system. For companies, saving a few hundred bucks here and there often isn't worth the hassles of introducing any extra friction.

I pointed out a difference like that once to the CTO, who then proceeded to show me the financials for the service. We were making something like a hundred thousand dollars a month from it (i had no idea, seemed like we only had a few clients... but they paid A LOT). $400 wasn't worth spending time thinking about. Especially if it might cause downtime.

for a startup, it might actually make more sense. Do you want to pay an engineer to setup the backups and monthly update cycle? Setup the alert monitoring?

There is an implicit cost there. If its only one or two of those things, just take the managed services.

If you start to scale, get an administrator type of employee to save on this

Managed PostgreSQL seemed worthwhile for an early startup that couldn't afford to lose an hour of production data.

Otherwise, I'd have to hire/contract someone very experienced, or dedicate a solid month or more of my time (which was not available), just to be 100% sure we could always restore journaled PITR backups quickly.

I can save orders of magnitude on cloud costs other places, but credible managed PostgreSQL was a pretty easy call (even if the entry-level price tag was more than you'd expect).

> Managed PostgreSQL seemed worthwhile for an early startup that couldn't afford to lose an hour of production data.

An early startup that cannot afford to lose an hour of production data is probably too fragile to survive anyway.

It's an early startup - there's going to be larger interruptions than that to the service and any customers who flee after a one hour loss of production data just didn't value the product enough anyway.

Different startups have different needs, and sometimes you have to try something with demanding technical/process execution, to possibly win big at something not everyone could pull off successfully.

(In the specific startup I was thinking of, I already had some nice automated frequent DB-online dumps to S3 with retention enforced, but I didn't think that was good enough for this particular scenario. But not being sure we coudl recover with PITR/journaling would adding a new single point of failure gamble on the success of a business that otherwise might have a 9+ figure exit in a few/several years, just to save a few hundred.)

Also, I suppose that some of the early startups that have less demanding needs, but are cavalier about their obligations towards customers'/users' data, are still being negligent wrt minimum basic practices.

Maybe one intuitive way to appreciate: Imagine a biz news story on HN, on some startup operations dropping of the ball, with startup founders' names attached, and the story says "...and it turns out they didn't have good backups...". Then one of the cofounders, who's maybe not slept much as their company is crashing around them, responds "Customer data isn't that important in an early startup; if it were, we'd be too fragile" (typed before the cofounder could throw that person's laptop across the room to stop them typing). It wouldn't be a good look.

> Different startups have different needs,

I'll address this at the end.

> Imagine a biz news story on HN, on some startup operations dropping of the ball, with startup founders' names attached, and the story says "...and it turns out they didn't have good backups...".

ITYM "...and it turns out they didn't have the last hour backed up..."

I can imagine everything in your scenario, even the unsnipped bits, and it all seems normal, unless you read "Our startup clients, who've been using us for a month, all left immediately when we lost the last hour of their data".

I really can't imagine that scenario.

Now, granted, there are some businesses where the benefit to using it is that there is not even an hour of lost data.

IOW, customers use it because it won't lose any data: online document collaboration[1], for example[2]. If you have a meltdown that loses an hour of the last inputted data, then sure, expect all affected current users to flee immediately.

[1] Although, personally, I'd mitigate the risk by duplicating the current document in localstorage while it is being edited.

[2] Maybe stock exchange also needs the system to keep the last hour of data? What else?

I’ve come to the same conclusion. Whenever I’ve looked at managed database pricing, I’ve always wanted to just do the management myself and just rent the underlying computation and storage.

I think even for larger teams it may make sense to manage databases yourself, assuming you have the competence to do it well. There are so many things that can go wrong with managed services and they don’t hide the underlying implementation the way that things like block storage or object storage do.

Why is postgres particularly overpriced in clouds?

I would suspect it’s because of memory. I remember years ago my cheap 512m mem vps is easily bottlenecked by pg’s memory usage. CPU is idle when idled, memory eat by pg does not get released. Scaling memory is not cheap. Memory is the “scarce” for cloud hosting.

Probably complexity + usually the most important data is there so companies are willing to pay the extra to have peace of mind

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