Hacker News Reader

Comment by erxam | Hacker News Reader

Even without taking into account the time investment in maintaining your own infra, it compares favorably with everything else. Even the most dirt-cheap VPS is a few bucks more expensive on a yearly basis by itself, and you still have to buy domains and similar.

Running your own infra only really works out if you either have access to great hardware for super-cheap or WANT the experience from setting everything up.

View on HN

It consistently surprises me how much software engineers devalue the effort of software engineering when it comes to their personal lives.

If you're a SWE in an English-speaking country, you almost certainly make $20 post-tax for at most one hour of work - 30m at SV salaries, as little as 15m if you're at a FAANG-ish company. Is it conceivable that you would spend less than an hour a year maintaining something like this if you were to do it yourself? I don't think so.

Most people can't earn money in increments of one additional hour, of course, but it still sounds strange to hear people say "why should I spend [the amount of money I earn in half an hour] per year when I could just do it myself [with an amount of professional effort I would expect to be paid 20x as much for]?"

I get where you are coming from, but I think the answer for a lot of us is... for the experience.

That's a perfectly valid motivation, but if it's really what someone is going for, I expect to hear an objection that sounds something like "oh, that's cool! but I'd rather try out doing it myself" rather than the faintly contemptuous "why is this worth $X when I could do it myself".

> Is it conceivable that you would spend less than an hour a year maintaining something like this if you were to do it yourself? I don't think so.

Is it conceivable that that you would spend much more than an hour maintaining this? Including making your stuff fit the mold, working around the limitations, and, inevitably, moving your stuff to a new service when this one fails, as they do?

Also: a VPS replaces quite a few of these services. Maintenance beyond initial setup and occasional update is rarely needed if you are the only user. People tend to overestimate these things.

Didn't you know that everyone on HN bakes their own bread?

> "Even the most dirt-cheap VPS is a few bucks more expensive on a yearly basis by itself"

Not if you get a Black Friday special; here[1] was $14.95/year for 40GB SSD, 1GB RAM, 1TB monthly bandwidth, 1CPU core.

RackNerd were offering $10.28/year[2] for 10GB SSD storage, 768MB RAM.

Hudson Valley offered $8/year[3] for 10GB SSD and 512MB RAM

[1] https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/190984/from-14-95-yr-10-gb...

[2] https://lowendbox.com/best-cheap-vps-hosting-updated-2020/ (sold out)

[3] https://lowendbox.com/blog/are-you-serious-hudson-valley-hos...

As with many other things, I'd advise against picking a VPS plan based on price alone.

I've found Vultr to be both affordable and of consistent quality for my modest needs (personal and business web hosting plus IRC bouncing). I pay about $5/mo or $60/year.

That's fine, but the complaint was that a VPS is "a few dollars more [than $20/year]" as if that was an objectionable amount/increase. In that case, money is the main decider and $60 is much worse, and $8 is much better. People fighting for "a few dollars" a year are likely to be expecting (or unhappily tolerate) lower quality.

I've had pretty good experiences of Linux VPSs for around $20/year from several companies.

So to beat omg.lol's price you have to hunt for a bargain, then hope the price doesn't double in the following year?

Oh, and you also need to own a domain already, otherwise it's an extra 10-20 bucks per year.

No, you can get a free Unix account on sdf.org with web hosting and email if you want to build for yourself the kind of thing omg.lol does and don't want a VPS. It's just "Even the most dirt-cheap VPS is a few bucks more [than $20/year]" is outdated, they're available less than half that price and likely only getting cheaper in future. If you really want, you can risk things like the Oracle Cloud Free Tier. If budget is what you want or need, then "hunting" (visiting Lowendbox.com) is something you are probably willing to do.

omg.lol gives a subdomain rather than a domain, right? So do free dynamic DNS providers like noip.com or dyndns.org (not sure if they still do free ones). If you want to register a domain, you also have outdated pricing, if you want cheap don't go for a popular TLD; .de is $4/year after the first year at Porkbun.com, .ovh is £2.99/year after the first year at OVH.com, internet people say .ru is available for $1/year.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com