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Comment by irjustin | Hacker News Reader

I see these articles on HN enough almost always end up agreeing. My gross over simplification of this problem is:

    The sweet spot for AWS seemingly is US$300-$3k/mth.

At that low end, you can get a mix of basic-but-okay DB, web servers, caching, CDN and maybe a few Lambdas all with logging/x-ray. All you'll need to run a good site/service w/ low-medium traffic and solid reliability. At around $3k/mth, you likely know whether you're in AWS to stay (using many services) or are eyeing the self hosting route.

Side projects really need to optimize under this $5-50/mth and that's just too low on AWS. The expensive foot-guns are just too risky.

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That’s still way too much. In my previous job I ran the site on $10 a month dual core cpu. It had decent traffic, live status updates, a live stream during 2 hours of the day, a successful e-commerce shop. The site was getting thousands of visits an hour and I was always surprised at how much bandwidth we would chew. It even survived a could have ddos attacks without issues. I also cached the hell out of it with memcached.

My past two previous projects have been on $5 vps with out issue. Some one really tried to bring one of them down with a ddos but gave up when it didn’t work.

A $5 VPS can take you very far if your project is well optimized.

Our biggest expense isn't cpu/bandwidth, it's data. S3 (that includes snapshots/backups), databases, and memory. So your experience aligns with mine for AWS, even though we spend magnitudes more.

We had a lot of data too, everyday we produced at least two hours of video, it would get encoded to the various formats we needed (broadcast and web), store the archive on our local server (which did a lot of backend tasks as well) and host them on Youtube/Facebook for the audience. We also had a 3rd party partner for the livestream on the site. All of that took a massive load off our web server.

If we had to have all of that on the cloud it would have been a lot more expensive.

I've heard quite a bit a few people mentioning this. Do you have any resources you could refer me to? Or is it something you have to learn as you go?

I've been doing web dev for at least 15 years now so I kind of grew up with the technologies. The thing that helped me the most was building stuff from scratch in my personal projects to learn what is actually happening behind the scenes and see if there is a better way of doing it.

The problem with frameworks/cms/etc is they are trying to solve everybody's problem but aren't really optimized to solve your specific problem if you have one.

At that lower end you get two of these machines, https://www.hetzner.com/sb/#price_from=100, plus another hundred bucks per month for fun and CDN and some DDOS protection if that's your thing and a backup solution. Pick a 256 GB RAM machine and one with 3-4 TB SSD.

It'll reliably cost exactly that and you'll be able to handle quite a lot of traffic. Probably enough that the same load would land you around 3k/month on AWS or GCP or whatever.

For 3k/month you can get hundreds of cores and 1-2 TB RAM on a couple of machines physically separated in a redundant data center setup. That's with markup from the data center selling it to you and the credit cost. After two-three years you own the hardware and can sell it if you want. A rig like this makes it rather easy to build HA-systems, have your devs experiment a bit with Ansible and keepalived and ProxySQL and they'll figure it out.

The beauty of Unix-like systems is that they're trivially discoverable and well documented. The clown platforms are not, and if your systems go down for whatever reason it's typically much harder and more labour intensive to get them back up again when they're clowned. This is especially the case if they get transfered to new management, e.g. due to bankruptcy proceedings. Paying a premium to get locked-in is a bad deal, unless you're the kind of organisation that is likely to also have mainframes in production.

There's a "sweet spot" between startup and enterprise where the cloud makes zero sense.

Startups will benefit from the cloud, as it allows them to easily scale, and maintain infrastructure that would otherwise be very costly.

Then at some point, around 50-100 employees (depending on business), it makes more sense to have a server park sitting at home, and you probably have the revenue to hire a couple of system administrators to handle stuff.

Then you have enterprise customers with 500+ employees, who have compliance and governance to follow, who maybe has huge spikes during a month (banks for one experience a lot more load during payday), which you will have to pay for in your local server farm, but you can dynamically scale in a cloud data center.

Not that you can just "throw everything in the cloud", it still requires planning for the best cost optimizing, but once you reach enterprise level you can probably afford a couple of cloud architects or similar to facilitate this.

Owning your servers works best if your load is stable and predictable.

If you make a mobile game that becomes an overnight success and your DAU goes from 10k to 1M you need the capacity TO-DAY. Not in a week or two when you can get more servers to the colocation facility your stuff is in and get them configured and added to the cluster.

If your stuff is built on AWS, it'll just scale up automatically and most likely nobody notices except for your AWS bill - but the revenue from the game will more than make up for it.

I'd say about $10k.

For that cost, you can get multiple production regions (for failover), dev/alpha/beta environments, a reasonable amount of CDN traffic, a bunch of databases and some halo services (like X-Ray/CloudWatch).

You have to be joking, there are massive Number of household name companies spending orders of magnitude more, on cloud. Companies that can afford to dedicated finOps people

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