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Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

$40/mo is outrageous? We spend thousands a month on AWS and drive most traffic thru a single NAT gateway. It's rock solid and it "just works" without any fuss. Totally worth it.

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There is where people usually start chiming in about how they can run a VPS at Whatever Hosting and Waffles Inc. for $4/mo.

yep, and they should. aws has never really been suited to the hobbyist. does it work for that? of course. is it most cost effective? absolutely not. is it cost effective for people who need the resources? yes.

> is it cost effective for people who need the resources? yes.

There is no possible use case in no possible universe where AWS is cost effective.

Renting the same compute resources wholesale will cost you 20 times less. (Not a typo.)

I run a number of personal projects on AWS entirely on their serverless offerings and pay $0 outside of domain registration as I'm well within their free tiers. That seems pretty cost effective.

Yes, if you can abuse the free tiers, you can essentially run a small SaaS company for free. Once you scale past that point, you are on the hook for a (probably much too large) bill, when you could still be using the same $5 VPS.

Yes, and for bandwidth, AWS is closer to 100x overpriced.

You must be talking about renting resources that run 100% of the time. AWS rents us gpu instances by the second. We have to run sporadic jobs throughout the day that take 50 seconds to two hours. Depending on customer activity we might need to run 10 or more at once, or we might lie idle for an hour. The elastic economics are unbeatable.

so I have an HTTP endpoint which gets maybe 10 hits per day, and does some lightweight computations and records small amount of data.

Right now, this is done on AWS, with lambda + S3, and costs under $0.02/month.

Can you point me to something more cost effective that that? Don't forget I also need backup for data, automatic failover in case of machine failure or crash, amd no maintenance (like OS upgrades) for 5+ years.

Stateless applications are far cheaper than stateful applications to host on AWS. Computing is cheap, object storage is where AWS make unreasonable profit and lock you in their platform.

Pipedream probably

See https://world.hey.com/dhh/we-stand-to-save-7m-over-five-year...

That does not answer my question though... I am not spending $600,000 on hardware!

I have no doubt that there are plenty of cases when local hardware is cheaper, but gp said "There is no possible use case in no possible universe where AWS is cost effective."... and I claim there are many use cases where AWS is cheaper.

Which hosting companies are there which are SoC-2 compliant and are 20 times less cost effective than AWS?

Enterprise workloads need compliance. AWS and GCP provide that. They are very few hosting companies out there who are better at security and compliance than those two.

Do you have the expertise and confidance to run at the same lvl as AWS does for cheaper?

Renting the same compute resources might cost you less but you are on the hook for maintenance and administration which can cost you more in the long run.

> Renting the same compute resources wholesale will cost you 20 times less. (Not a typo.)

You mean like S3 object storage? That costs less outside AWS because you are usually getting less. That's if you can get it at all.

S3 is not a compute resource.

Right. But at least in my field (databases) many compute resources are useless without it.

sure they became a multi billion dollar business by not being cost effective

They became a multi-billion dollar business by:

A) Promising scale (and delivering to a certain extent)

B) being significantly more convenient than contemporary solutions

C) becoming trendy

D) hoodwinking CxO’s into the belief that not owning your data is better for you, actually. (CapEx vs OpEx)

E) unfathomable amounts of DevRel.

Nobody has ever claimed AWS was cost effective, they have said that “it’s worth the cost” though.

> cost effective

> it’s worth the cost

Sounds about the same.

I guess you could read it that way.

The issue tends to be that people do not actually stay on top of their spend- they claim to need less headcount but then spend more than a few salaries worth on their cloud spend.

They claim they do not need headcount but then spend the same headcount in infra people anyway, or finops people in the best case.

people have lost touch with how much compute actually costs, because its little by little and claims to scale to zero or you only pay what you want. - yet every installation I’ve ever seen has had a base cost higher than the largest colo installation cost we would have needed times 2.

Its not cost effective, because its on average 11x more expensive than a fully managed colocation installation. - your packets dont care that you spent 11x more on half the performance.

And all those cloud compute instances are probably strangled for io if there is any real load. Colocating your own equipment is going to give way better base performance. Compute is not just processor and memory, it's also dependent on network and disk i/o. Disk is often overlooked because modern disks are so fast, people don't even realize it's crippled in the cloud.

It really is crippled to an absurd degree. A basic RDS install with a gp3 volume will get 3k IOPS and 0.125 GB/s transfer if your volume is under 400 GB, or 12k IOPS and 0.5 GB/s transfer if it's larger. The monthly per-GB storage cost for RDS is the same as the capital costs to buy the disks in a mirrored setup. Meanwhile, if you bought the disks, you'd get over 100x the IOPS and 10x the transfer.

For a provisioned IOPS volume, you can get up to 256k IOPS (so still a fraction of a single drive) at a cost of $25600/month (plus per-GB storage costs). For that price, you could buy 8x of these: https://www.newegg.com/micron-30-72-tb-9400/p/N82E1682036315... giving you 240 TB of raw SSD storage.

No, the second line is when somebody else is paying the bill.

AWS is a boutique retail reseller for compute. It's okay for very tiny projects, or for vanity purposes.

Yes it is which is why Lightsail exists. The whole mantra of the cloud is only pay for what you need and scale down to zero.

Plus $0.045 per gigabyte of data that passes through it.

AWS has notoriously high egress fees.

It's not just egress in case of NAT - they charge you 4.5c per processed GB which means in both directions. This trips a lot of people up.

Wait what... Ingress too? :o

Yes "ingress" too (quotes bc in this case it needs to be initiated from the vpc)

I ran into a SaaS company recently that had a guide for how to setup a white-label domain using route 53 and Cloudfront for one of their services. The SaaS company charges for service bandwidth usage, and they host their infrastructure on AWS, so if you opt to follow their guide they get a fat margin bump in the form of avoiding an egress charge and you get to be double-charged for bandwidth. You've gotta love it.

How are the avoiding egress costs? I am not completely following.

Egress to cloudfront is free on aws

Imagine a cloud transfer utility that made that easily possible?

If I follow what you're saying I suppose my understanding could be wrong, but there's no "cloud transfer" required. It's just a matter of both the distribution and the configured origin being on AWS. If the origin doesn't direct traffic outside of the datacenter, AWS doesn't bill that as egress to whoever owns the origin. The Cloudfront distribution, on the other hand, will take the hit once it exceeds the free tier because it's the AWS service distributing data to end-users. It has to make a request to the AWS internal service then cache it, so The SaaS lambda or s3 bucket or EC2 instance or whatever they're using is none-the-wiser. It's just how the AWS billing mechanism works.

$40/month just to run it, but then $0.045 per GB data rates. The data rates are what is outrageous. NAT Gateways comprise a non-trivial portion of many customer's bills for this reason.

Exactly, it is $32 just to have it turned on 24/7 and then you pay additionally. Looked into it as it is the only(?) way to get dedicated IP for Lambda which is a common use case, which also explains why it is so costly. They lure you in free tier and then charge for all the necessities.

Most users are below 10Mbps average, so yes $480 per year is a huge price for a fraction of a percent share of a router (plus redundancy).

Okay and those users can easily use a much cheaper NAT instance instead of managed NAT Gateways.

The expensive part of NAT Gateway is the $0.045/GB.

It's worth it if you spend thousands a month. I run assorted personal projects in AWS and pay $80/month. Another $40/month looks like a lot to me.

But I think the point is more that it's outrageous compared to the marginal costs.

Leasing an IPv4 is 0.40 per month. The 39.60 on top is just their margin.

Amazon owns millions of IPv4s which they purchased for probably less than $5 a pop. So it completely pays for itself after less than a year then it’s just free cash flow

Where?

Exchange prices are still in that region, at least for some RIRs: https://www.ipxo.com/market-stats/

For a lot of traffic $40 is not outrageous.

For a little traffic $40 is outrageous.

For a lot of traffic, the $40 is nothing compared to the per GB price.

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