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Comment by oxfordmale | Hacker News Reader

Buying your own server requires an upfront investment. AS 90% of start-ups fail, hiring your computing resource flexibly is far better, even if it comes at a higher cost. Once your company is mature and relatively stable, it is worth considering if hosting your infrastructure is more cost-effective.

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So don't buy them, rent them. There are plenty of points on the spectrum between buying your own HW and EC2.

But now you have a culture that has no experience or value with self hosted hardware. How are you going to fix that cultural problem? Hire a bunch of outsiders? How’s that gonna fly?

Bringing your infrastructure from Cloud to on-perm is a project; you would have to hire a dedicated team. Once you have proven your start-up is providing a genuine solution, it is a lot easier to get funding for this.

And you haven't had turf wars where people conflate the issues and costs so badly that nobody really knows what the truth is anymore?

Apparently I'm getting your share.

You're missing several points on the spectrum.

You can provision dedicated servers with Terraform.

They can still be cloudy in the way you deal with hardware maintenance and risk of failure, and how you authenticate with them and how you name them, and how you hook them up on VPNs. But they're physical units without the AWS bells and whistles or the AWS premium. Not everyone needs their own colocated rack, and manage their own UPS and network peering.

The main problem is OPEX versus APEX, not whether you can Terraform your infrastructure. It depends on your business model whether self-hosting is more cost effective than the Cloud. Cloud is more flexible and as a result you pay a premium, however, the cost differences are not as large as claimed in this article

I think you're missing GP's point: On-prem/self-hosting vs. cloud aren't the only two solutions. You can also simply rent a managed (physical) server, like many people did before The Cloud became a thing.

OPEX vs. APEX is an interesting aspect.

It's covered more elsewhere in this thread, and I appreciated learning about it.

I wouldn't say that renting managed servers is simple at scale.

But it is both simpler and less expensive when not at scale.

> I wouldn't say that renting managed servers is simple at scale.

…unless they are not physical servers but vservers. Hetzner, for instance, has such a "cloud" offering where you can dynamically spin up new vservers via an API/Terraform.

They represent yet another point on the spectrum but are not "fully cloud" yet if we take "fully cloud" to mean that, beyond hardware, the software stack is partly managed by a third party, too.

Put differently, to me the spectrum looks more or less like this:

- On-prem self-hosting (own data center, own hardware etc.) - (Off-prem) non-managed hosting (data center provided by third party, but you're providing the server hardware and put it in one of their racks) - Managed hosting of physical servers (data center + server hardware provided by third party) - Managed hosting of vservers (Hetzner Cloud, AWS EC2, …) - "Full cloud": Software stack is partly managed by 3rd party (e.g. managed Postgres, managed Kafka, managed ElasticSearch, serverless, etc.)

This is a very good point. In other words, it's a classic Capital Expenditure vs Operating Expense. For startups it's usually more efficient to have a higher OpEx in the beginning and focus on optimizing OpEx later.

I can recommend this article for those who are interested - https://www.cloudzero.com/blog/capex-vs-opex

If your startup survive next 6 months it is already more cost-effective to buy a server. And if startup fails you still have a server to run your next startup.

Not necessarily.

https://www.itpro.co.uk/cloud/public-cloud/369521/singapore-...

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