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Comment by ckdarby | Hacker News Reader

Except the need for managing it securely. Oh, it is very successful? Now the 50 dev team each want one.

Oh, you maxed out the number of ports on the switch.

One of those GPUs have customer information that only select individuals should have.

One of them needs to write only for off-site backups.

Every time this on-prem vs cloud stuff comes up folks just skim over all the other pieces included. Didn't even talk about racking, network and or power.

Yes, there is a spot and time where on-prem makes sense and there is also a time for cloud.

I barely cover some of them in this 30 min video, https://youtu.be/8i7i1VFSJrw?si=pLyIhwgxe4d3efvb

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You’re adopting an almost religious dogma about this. At the end of the day, it’s a dollars and cents decision.

During development and growth of services, cloud makes total sense as you abstract the capital costs. If you’re a startup making Uber for cupcake makers, you’d be dumb to do anything else.

Depending on your needs, once things settle down, it’s often cheaper and more effective to capitalize your costs yourself.

It’s akin to a car. If you go somewhere for a day or two, Uber makes sense. For a week or more, rent a car, for a year, you probably want to buy or lease a vehicle.

Again, it depends on you. For me, I have large workloads running in GCP and Amazon. But 80% of the production I’m responsible for is “on-prem”, because it’s about 30% cheaper. YMMV

Lease a Server

You get all of above (mgmt, etc) for the same cost.

For example, you can get for the same $1200/year:

- 16 core (Zen4 current gen)

- 128 GB RAM (ECC/DDR5)

- 2 x 2TB NVME

For just $100/mo.

https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ax102/configura...

I feel like the greatest marketing move AWS has played is getting people to forget that Leasing Servers is a thing.

Hetzner has some weird and very strong opinions on what you can and cannot do on their servers, likely because they are so cheap they attract all sorts of shady customers.

I've had good luck with OneProvider.

> Hetzner has some weird and very strong opinions on what you can and cannot do on their servers

My company has never used them... what have you experienced?

> "very strong opinions on what you can and cannot do on their servers"

Another way of saying that is, "they don't want spammers as customers since that can negatively effect other (good) customers".

Which I'm just fine with.

It's quite a bit broader than that [1], and so worth being aware of as it's stricter than many US providers, but unless you happen to fall in one of those categories it's also not a big problem:

"This includes in particular, but is not limited to, pornographic or obscene material, extremist content or content that offends common decency, gambling, material that could seriously endanger the morals of children or young people or violate the rights of third parties (copyrights, name rights, trademark rights and data protection rights). This also includes the publication of defamatory content, insults or disparagement of persons or groups of persons."

On top of that there's a blanket ban on crypto.

Personally I've used them for 15+ years at a number of companies and never had a problem. But I accept some people will want to set up content that violates or skirts close enough to break those rules to be uncomfortable.

[1] https://www.hetzner.com/legal/terms-and-conditions

Not with a GPU

I've done racking, wiring up the network, etc. and if that adds up to more than ~3%-5% of your total spend, you're bad enough at it that you should lease spent at a managed hosting facility. That also makes your power predictable - it's baked into the rack rental most places.

In which case most of the steps you list boils down to "go to their website and fill in a support request" or tick some boxes, and if there's a wait, spin up a cloud instance in the same network in the meantime.

Very few people mean actually on prem when they say on prem. Usually the comparison is with managed hosting or at most colo providers where you can but don't have to wire things up yourself.

Sure, there are use cases where cloud is cheaper, but most people are nowhere near them. There are also cases where actual on prem makes sense. But unless you're somewhere where power and real estate is cheap, odds are your cheapest option will be managed hosting, by a large factor over cloud, and a quite a bit smaller factor over on prem.

> Except the need for managing it securely.

Putting a server in EC2 doesn't make it secure.

> Oh, it is very successful? Now the 50 dev team each want one.

Cool, now you're paying 50x as much.

Until some junior uses an instance store for customer data or creds.

The tasks you are talking about is not rocket science.

Before the cloud most companies did this themselves.

You assume the only people with the capability to do this stuff are cloud vendors.

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