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Comment by profwalkstr | Hacker News Reader

Shocked about the prices. Outside of AWS/Azure/GCP, many companies offer bare-metal dedicated server, with very high specs and would cost a lot less (around $40-60) per month. And they can be used as remote workstations.

I myself use a Hetzner server as a remote workstation, which I connect via RDP. 12 cores Intel processor, 64 GB RAM, 2x1 TB HDD and 2x512 GB SSD for US$ 60. If there’s any hardware issue it’s their problem and they will fix it really quickly, so I don’t have to worry about it.

GCP/Azure/AWS prices are insane.

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I fully agree (I also use Hetzner servers, BTW). I'm amazed so many people pay the huge premium to get "instant scalability", even though they don't actually need instant scalability and might in fact never need it.

> I'm amazed so many people pay the huge premium to get "instant scalability",

For personal use, the interesting part about cloud isn't the scaling up—it's the ability to scale down rapidly to (near) zero costs. I have a couple of GPU instances on AWS that I only use sporadically at spot-prices; when turned off, I'm only paying for the EBS storage.

If I were to rent servers from Hetzner (which I have done it the past for longer running things), it would cost me €40-80 a month, vs €10 a month.

(There's other minor niceties from cloud as well, for example: I also have a lambda in my account that when any instance starts, it checks for a DnsName tag, and configures a appropriate A records pointing toward that instance's new IP address)

Agree on the cloud prices, though there are use cases for very abrupt scaling.

Btw azure has a tco calculator so you can see what assumptions you have to make for the cloud to come out ahead.

Fair point about the scaling but a 9-5 job is pretty much the opposite... Very predictable usage and even on better priced cloud providers you can quickly provision new hardware when needed, e.g. some kind of load testing (which would be more ops than dev anyways)

Oh, I don't disagree that it is a bad fit for this particular use case (except if your company hires a lot of seasonal data-enty WFH workers).

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