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Comment by matsz | Hacker News Reader

This is precisely why I stick to dedicated servers for my own personal projects.

$40/month for a machine, doesn't get any more predictable than this.

If you rent a dedicated server from AWS, you will be hit for various additional fees which will likely dwarf that $40/month.

So the issue here is not really shared vs dedicated instances. The issue here is that a particular cloud provider (namely AWS) has set up an opaque fee structure.

> If you rent a dedicated server from AWS

Who, in their right mind, goes for a bare metal to AWS, when there are so many decent and time-tested options out there?

Data Gravity. If you already have all your data in AWS, and your app that is generating new data is in AWS, it makes a lot of sense to get bare metal in AWS to do batch workloads on that data, so there is no egress fees.

We did a calculation in my previous company and it turned out even with the egregious egress costs it was way cheaper to host these huge workloads outside of AWS.

crypto hft

Anyone who has experience with AWS or is looking to hire candidates with known skills. AWS is the industry standard. A lot of quality candidates know it and use it, because it pays the best and has the most job opportunities. And most companies use it because they were first to market and its easy to find candidates.

I'd argue that startups should have a good reason for not using AWS. The costs for their basic services is not that much compared to the cost of development.

In my experience, when people say "dedicated server" they typically mean something like OVH rather than a real "cloud" provider (AWS, GCP, Azure, etc.). In other words, something morally equivalent to colo but without having to ship servers around.

Yes, that is likely the case here as well. But if someone is not well versed in cloud providers and reads these comments, they might be misinformed without clarifying that this issue is AWS vs other providers, as opposed to dedicated vs shared resources.

Oh no, I would never go AWS for dedicated. Should've specified that in my comment so people don't get disappointed if they try to get that from AWS.

I suspect they're not getting a dedicated server from Amazon. Anyone doing that is either foolish or is so locked into AWS infrastructure that it cost-wise makes more sense than to expand a network to another provider. Fun times, indeed.

What I started doing is just running my own "cloud" out of my house for personal projects. I have all of the things I need. There's some overhead in terms of maintenance and up-front setup cost in terms of time and equipment, but after that it's pretty smooth sailing.

You still have network performance limitations + the security aspects to run by yourself (as in: not getting your data drive encrypted by a ransomware)

I probably wasn't explicit enough with "cloud" but I mean running your own isolated workloads with at minimum virtual machines and virtual isolated storage (block or otherwise). From a topological perspective my home DC resembles most major clouds other than the fact that there are not two sites.

> I suspect they're not getting a dedicated server from Amazon.

If it's literally called a dedicated server, why would you suspect otherwise?

Source: I worked in the core EC2 dataplane for a couple years. PEs and leadership there would not be happy with misleading customers. We constantly thought of the customer experience there.

Generally you get a "dedicated host" from AWS, not a "dedicated server" so that was kind of my first tip off. There's a very big difference; the only usecase I'd really consider for dedicated hosts is security related and, frankly, they're far more expensive than any colo box. Dedicated Hosts are also far more restrictive than what you get at a colo DC. Second, even if AWS offered to let you have full control of a rack box you'd have to be economically out of your mind with AWS' network costs compared to a colo DC.

I think you misread the comment you responded to.

It didn’t mean ”I suspect that what they are getting from Amazon isn’t a dedicated server”.

Rather it meant ”I suspect that they’re getting a dedicated server from somewhere else that isn’t Amazon”.

The original comment was talking about a dedicated machine for personal projects with a fixed cost of $40/month.

Ah, this makes sense. Thanks for clarifying!

You can get much cheaper dedicated servers with alternative providers such as OVH.

There's no way you're getting a machine for $40/month. :-)

Did you mean a dedicated VM or VPS?

(I have a bunch of actual dedicated machines with different providers, and this would save me a lot of money.)

(Edit: holy moly those prices are fantastic!)

OVH and Hetzner have offerings at that price range. you can use a tool like serverhunter.com to find all sorts of economically-priced servers.

Yep, I'm renting two servers from Hetzner; have one in Germany and another in Finland. Both cheap (€40/month) and over the few years I've been using their services, I have nothing to complain about.

Does OVH asks for passport verification too, like Hetzner?

Why would they ask for a passport? Many people don't even have one.

The worst part is they ask for it after you have enter your credit card details. Maybe they have policies per geographic region for this.

OVH's so you start and server4you offer dedicated machines for around that price. For personal projects they work great

Yeah, Hetzner has 20 vCPU 64GB RAM i5-13500 servers for $40/mo:

https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ex/

This is ~10x cheaper than the closest AWS option, and without the extra fees.

Also of note that Hetzner is profitable, which means AWS has been operating at an insane markup.

> Also of note that Hetzner is profitable, which means AWS has been operating at an insane markup.

You can also evidence of this on their 10-Q :^)

If you think offering a cloud service is at all the same as offering someone a box in a rack, I invite you to compete in the space.

Hetzner does have a cloud VPS option, which is still very affordable: https://www.hetzner.com/cloud

This is pretty heads-to-heads with EC2, in terms of how it works behind the scenes.

So go with hetzner?

Already do :-)

It's more than a box in a rack. These providers do actively monitor and fix these boxen. They can all be rebooted remotely as if you physically hit the button, you've got interfaces to access the machine as if you were logging in physically with a DB-9/RS232/ethernet/whatever console, etc.

It's not just "space in a rack and you deal with the servers yourself and you come to fix them if they break".

These companies know what they're doing.

You're missing the point. There's a massive difference between getting a box service, and getting a highly available regionally distributed service with a semblance of a SLA of bandwidth to anywhere on the planet. To quote a former manager, its not even apples and oranges, is apples and pumpkins. They simply aren't in any way the same scope.

What do you mean? The big bare metal providers have multiple datacenters with fat pipelines and peering. You can put those geo-separated servers in the same subnet. Europe and US is covered, it looks like Asia a black spot for Hetzner, I will give you that. I doubt that so many business have such size and global reach, that world wide latency is a priority. If it would be, the average site would not connect to 20 domains to load megabytes of javascripts, trackers and what not.

(Also, at Hetzner you can even rent their network hardware if you want to make custom solutions.

Sure, go build your own less reliable cloud. But don't pretend that single box pricing is comparable to single cloud service as a result.

I don’t know why you are suggesting that people will build unreliable things. My company’s first day of AWS was the first time AWS had a major outage. We were sold on more reliable, but I can tell you AWS is just as reliable as home grown BS, if not less reliable. The biggest difference is what you do during downtime: in AWS, you refresh status pages. In your actual hardware, you’re actually problem solving and able to build/deploy workarounds to get back working within 30m.

Having worked for one of the major cloud providers in the past, I second this.

In fact, I have no idea why people go for those. You pay a massive premium for the "privilege" of not owning the infrastructure, and being subject to opaque pricing and outages that are completely beyond your control.

And in terms of actually managing the stuff, now you have to pay staff to manage your cloud things too.

It makes no sense to me.

Hetzner is actually offering their Hetzner Cloud and it's a joy to work with because of its simplicity (think about the early days of AWS). You can do everything in Terraform or via their CLI if you prefer. Setting up a full k8s cluster takes maybe 10 minutes including all configuration.

Dang, that is a fantastic deal. The €100 / month is even better - DDR5 RAM, 2TB NVME raid 1, and it's all customizable too. Just have to wait for Ubuntu 24.04 to be available and might have to make this switch.

Yeah, they're all pretty fantastic. Can even upgrade existing servers with more RAM/disk, or store ~250 TB of data for $400/mo etc.

Not to mention unlimited free 1 Gbit egress/server

Just setup two Ubuntu 24.04 servers in last couple of days. One at Hetzner and another on AWS.

And this is just for the "dumb" EC2 instance, the markup on their "smarter" stuff is probably much higher. In general I understand why one would want to start off in the cloud but staying there for 10+ years is quite absurd given the costs.

Yeh but a pragmatic decision like a $40pcm box won't go down well with your now very bored team of SREs, DevOps and distributed systems engineers(tm) who demand more playtime with the magic cloud toybox (for a 100DAU internal app).

Is there anything stopping those teams from deploying k8s and every possible apache product onto these machines?

There's also middle ground in the form of Digital ocean's kubernetes which runs noticeably cheaper than big tech cloud offerings.

You guys have teams that decide the infra they run ?

If they manage it in my company at least of course, the real question is if they want to manage it (and know what that means). Usually they don't, in my experience.

Those people will actually be grateful they don't have to deal and spend weeks to debug yet another cloud provider hidden gotcha or bug and convince support they are right. They will now very happy as they can now deliver value (at relative scale) and really speed up processes. I know I am.

Good ol' bare metal is real nice, but it won't save you from application complexity, security requirements, and so on - you still need to manage it somewhat. If you're not a startup looking for market fit at least.

I'm not sure about that. We get paid well for working with (or around) public cloud complexity, but I bet many of us would gladly manage much simpler setups like the Hetzner Cloud.

I've got a dedicated machine for $30/month. It's ancient, a xeon L5640 with 16 GB ram, and 1 TB spinning disk, but it's dedicated and it works great. Well actually, the first one stopped working well, and I got a replacement with double those specs for the same price; and the second one is working great. I also run with full disk encryption, because I don't trust their opsec on wiping drives, so that's a bit of a hassle to reboots, I have to get a console with IPMI and put in the disk password, although I saw something [1] last night that inspires me to consider the possibility of automation.

I recommend shopping at https://lowendbox.com/ and https://lowendtalk.com/categories/offers

[1] https://github.com/emtiu/freebsd-outerbase

Also a dedicated VM is /literally/ a dedicated machine. It's in the name!

A dedicated virtual machine is a kind of dedicated machine, sure. Like a private community swimming pool is a kind of private swimming pool.

> There's no way you're getting a machine for $40/month. :-)

Oh you can!

I've got several dedicated servers at OVH. My absolute cheapest one is an "ECO" / Kimsufi (Kimsufi is a company which spun out of OVH then, a few years later, back into OVH) which I pay... 5 EUR / month. 6 EUR / month with VAT (so 6.5 USD per month).

Sure, it's not beefy at that price: an Atom N2800 with 4 GB or RAM but it is a dedicated server with its own IPv4 IP (yup, there can be uses for that).

I mostly use it as a jump host / reverse-ssh-with-a-known-fixed-IP thinggy.

They've got great dedicated servers at very good price and they're not the only ones in that space.

These can be rebooted/reinstalled remotely and they're monitored: OVH shall deal with hardware failure, if any, for you (never had any so far).

I'm renting a box from Hetzner - 4x 22tb HD, 2x 1.5TB NVME SSD, Ryzen 3600, 64gb ecc ram... for 100$ per month! It's nice :)

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