In your specific situation: it really just is the case that Brazil soaks us on import fees. Getting machines in racks in Brazil is just crazy expensive. We're going to keep doing it! Brazil has too many good sandwiches. But the idea behind building a new public cloud on our own hardware is for us to be around for the long haul, and flat low global pricing is not a "long haul" decision.
(It wasn't a long haul decision last year, either, but building a billing system capable of expressing this stuff is a nightmare from which we have not yet fully awoken. It turned out to be a shockingly hard problem.)
There are going to be cases where places like Hetzner make a lot sense compared to us. We hope you get your thing launched and find success wherever you end up. Some of our stuff, like LiteFS, you can take with you! :)
I was expecting a larger grace period from announcement to price change though. You got it right when you started charging for stopped volumes - you overcommunicated and gave users estimates for a few months before you started charging. Smoothing the increase over the next 4 months was nice.
A couple of nits as well: - AFAIK prices increased in all but two regions. The announcement could be clearer or more direct regarding this. - The pricing page could have a clearer from/to. I have to click on the example toggle to know how much machines cost before the change.
Fly’s pitch is not just on demand scalable compute, but also that compute being close to the edge, and with “ops-less” deployments. All of those are factors you pay for.
You could pay a little less with a big cloud provider’s serverless platform, a bit less again with regular cloud VMs, a lot less with colo hardware, and a ton less running your own DC (at scale). Obviously not all of these work for all businesses, but saying Hetzner is cheaper than Fly misses the point of those two services on the spectrum of service levels.
This has me so confused. Should the cloud abstractions not clearly make the service more optimizable at scale and thus cheaper to offer? Sandboxing things, limiting options, not having to deal with users wanting to provision VMs and do all kinds of unexpected stuff? The marginal cost of the beautiful software to make all of that happen smoothly, and all the dx it affords, that will just go towards 0, no?
I understand that people ask for what they can get away with. But does the market fail or am I missing a piece of the cost/price puzzle?
Only very specific serverless products where the provider can bin-pack you with other tenants allow them to possibly offer lower prices.
At one side, the big cloud providers have their very fair profit margins. But I've always assumed that comes mostly from that they can, and do, charge extra for the beautiful software (not seldomly through ridiculous egress bandwidth pricing).
I'm skeptical of how much flexibility and optimisation the big cloud providers really get compared to a very large VPS provider?
All the compute products (different form of container hosting, serverless) are essentially still priced at CPU+RAM + a premium. Some additional abstraction for nouveau databases ("capacity" or "billing" units). Many of the highly abstracted offerings also have the scale-to-zero concept, while the provider still have to have physical capacity ready (to some extent).
Sure, you can probably crank out some percentage more utilisation, but that doesn't really matter for the 100+% price-add on the market bears.
But I of course have no data to back up my claims, just speculation.
- Things change and break. You are paying for people to fix that for you at 2 AM, and to keep up with industry developments and best practices and make those decisions for you.
- Legal risk and compliance requirements change. You are paying for them to keep up with those for you.
- Overhead imposed by multi-tenancy. Security boundaries, control planes, etc. These are fixed operational costs caused by the abstraction.
You're not paying for just an abstraction, you're paying for the things the abstraction enables. It's also not always what you need. But it often makes good business sense.
And then you’re at the mercy of whatever support agent decides to look at your ticket and that can take days.
Use literally anyone but Hetzner is my advice.
Also support is competent and quick. We usually get an answer in few hours most of the time.
Took my data and never returned.
https://www.trustpilot.com/review/hetzner.com <-- There are a large number of both 5-star and 1-star reviews with almost nothing in the middle.
Please give us an update here when you are done building your hetzner beowulf cluster and let us know how it fares. I think you are grossly underestimating the system you describe.
E.g. a load balancer in front of some relatively stateless http microservices is really not going to tie you to Fly.io because of complexity. A globally distributed edge compute environment with database, RPC, varying scaling patterns, and environment certifications is probably not going to have the value prop impacted by this kind of minor pricing change though.
None of this is impossible, but when you are a small startup it makes sense to offload this to someone else and not waste time reinventing the wheel.
You won't be a small team by the time you're at a scale to need horizontal scaling. Only the biggest consumer facing/social media sites get value from that.