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Comment by jwr | Hacker News Reader

I do that. In fact I've been doing it for years, because every time I do the math, AWS is unreasonably expensive and my solo-founder SaaS would much rather keep the extra money.

I think there is an unreasonable fear of "doing the routing and everything". I run vpncloud, my server clusters are managed using ansible, and can be set up from either a list of static IPs or from a terraform-prepared configuration. The same code can be used to set up a cluster on bare-metal hetzner servers or on cloud VMs from DigitalOcean (for example).

I regularly compare this to AWS costs and it's not even close. Don't forget that the performance of those bare-metal machines is way higher than of overbooked VMs.

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100% agree. People still think that maintaining infrastructure is very hard and requires lot of people. What they disregard is that using cloud infrastructure also requires people.

I was more talking about physical backbone connection which hetzner does for you.

We are using hetzner cloud.. but we are also scaling up and down a lot right now

Could you please explain what you mean by "physical backbone connection", as I can't think of a meaning that fits the context.

If you mean dealing with the physical dedicated servers that can be rented from Hetzner, that's what the person you replied to was talking about being not so difficult.

If you mean everything else at the data centre that makes having a server there worthwhile (networking, power, cooling, etc.) I don't think people were suggesting doing that themselves (unless you're a big enough company to actually be in the data centre business), but were talking about having direct control of physical servers in a data centre managed by someone like Hetzner.

(edit: and oops sorry I just realised I accidentally downvoted your comment instead of up, undone and rectified now)

With "routing" I meant the backbone connection, which is included in the hetzner price.

Aka if I add up power (including backup) + backbone connection rental + server deprication I can not do it for the hetzner price..

That was quite imprecise, sorry about that.

I think no one talked about having physical server on their own premises but colocating servers in a data center or renting servers in a data center.

No worries, easy to not foresee every possible way in which strangers could interpret a comment!

But I think that people (at least jwr, and probably even nyc_data_geek saying "on prem") are talking about cloud (like AWS) vs. renting (or buying) servers that live in a data centre run by a company like Hetzner, which can be considered "on prem" if you're the kind of data centre client who has building access to send your own staff there to manage your servers (while still leaving everything else, possibly even legal ownership and therefore deprecation etc. to the data centre owner).

What you're thinking of - literally taking responsibility for running your own mini data centre - I think is hardly ever considered (at least in my experience), except by companies at the extremes of size. If you're as big as Facebook (not sure where the line is but obviously including some companies not AS big as Meta but still huge) then it makes sense to run your own data centres. If you're a tiny business getting less than thousands of website visits a day and where the website (or whatever is being hosted) isn't so important that a day of downtime every now and then isn't a big deal, then it's not uncommon to host from the company's office itself (just using a spare old PC or second hand cheap 1U server, maybe a cheap UPS, and just connected to the main internet connection that people in the office use, and probably managed by a single employee, or company owner, who happens to be geeky enough to think it's one or both of simple or fun to set up a basic LAMP server, or even a Windows server for its oh-so-lovely GUI).

You usually just do colocation. The data center will give you a rack (or space for one), an upstream gateway to your ISP, and redundant power. You still have to manage a firewall and your internal network equipment, but its not really that bad. I've used PFsense firewalls, configured by them for like $1500, with roaming vpn, high availability, point to point vpn, and as secure as reasonably possible. After that it's the same thing as the cloud except its physical servers.

i mean, yes.. but you pay for that, and colocation + server deprication in the case i calculated was higher then just renting the servers

When talking about Hetzner pricing, please don’t change the subject to AWS pricing. The two have nothing in common, and intuition derived from one does not transfer to the other.

> please don’t change the subject to AWS pricing

Why? The only reason I'm using Hetzner and not AWS for several of my own projects (even though I know AWS much better since this is what I use at work) is an enormous price difference in each aspect (compute, storage, traffic).

> The two have nothing in common

If all you need are some cloud servers, or a basic load balancer, they are pretty much the same.

If you need a plethora of managed services and don't want to risk getting fired over your choice or specifics of how that service is actually rendered, they are nothing alike and you should go for AWS, or one of the other large alternatives (GCP, Azure etc.).

On the flip side, if you are using AWS or one of those large platforms as a glorified VPS host and you aren't doing this in an enterprise environment, outside of learning scenarios, you are probably doing something wrong and you should look at Hetzner, Contabo, or one of those other providers, though some can still be a bit pricey - DigitalOcean, Vultr, Scaleway etc.

> the two have nothing in common

Well, in my case at least, what they have in common is that I can choose to run my business on one or the other. So it's not about intuition, but rather facts in my case: I avoid spending a significant amount of money.

I (of course) do realize that if you design your software around higher-level AWS services, you can't easily switch. I avoided doing that.

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