Comment by t_mahmood | Hacker News Reader

Comment by t_mahmood | Hacker News Reader

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I don't get why people are so hell-bent on going to AWS, for the most minor applications, without looking at simpler options!

I am not even thousands km near the level of what you are doing, but my client was paying $100/m for an AWS server, SQS and S3 bucket, for a small PHP based web application that uses Amazon Seller API, Keepa API for the products he ships. Used MySQL for data storage.

I implemented the whole thing in Python, Django, and PostgreSQL (initially used SQLite) put it in a $25/m unmanaged VPS.

I have not got any complaints about performance, and it's running continuously updating product prices, details, processing PDF invoices using OCR, finding missing products in shipments, while also serving the website, and a 4 core server with 6GB RAM is handling it just fine.

The load is not going to be so high to require AWS and friends, for now. It's a small internal app, probably won't even get over 100 users, and if it ever does, it's extremely simple to migrate, because the app is so compact, even though not exactly monolithic.

And still, it probably won't need a $100 AWS server, unless we are scaling up much larger.

AWS is useful for big business. Automatic multi region failover and hosted databases may be expensive, but they're a massive pain to manually configure and an easy footgun if you're not used to doing that sort of thing. Plus, with Amazon you already have public toolkits to use those features with all of your services, so you don't need to figure how to integrate/what open source system to use to accomplish all of that. Plus, if you go for your own physical server, you need to arrange parts and maintenance windows for any hardware that will eventually fail.

If all you need is "good enough" reliability and basic compute power (which I think is good enough for many businesses, considering AWS isn't exactly outage free either), you're probably better off getting a server or renting one from a cheap cloud host. If you're promising five nines of uptime for some reason, you may want to reconsider.

> If all you need is "good enough" reliability and basic compute power (which I think is good enough for many businesses, considering AWS isn't exactly outage free either), you're probably better off getting a server or renting one from a cheap cloud host.

This is exactly my point. Sorry if I was not clear on my OP.

We are using Seller API to get different product information, while their API provides base work for communicating with their endpoint, you'll have to implement your own system to use that, and handle the absurd unreliability of their API's rate limiter, and the spider web of API callbacks to get information that you require.

How much did that reimplementing cost and when will the savings exceed that cost?

This costed around $10k. Which also includes work that is outside the reimplementation.

I do not know how much actually cost of the original application.

The app, that I was developing, was for another purpose, and the reimplementation was later added.

The app replaces an existing commercial app that is being used, which is $200+/m. So, may be 4/5 years to exceed the savings. They have been using the app for 3 years, I think.

And, maybe I am beating my drum a little, I believe my implementation works, and looks much better than the commercial or the first implementation.

So, I am really looking forward for this to success.

Without understanding the architecture and use case better, at first read, my gut says that isn’t an AWS problem - it sounds like a solutions architecture problem.

There are cheaper ways of building that use case on AWS.

Most AWS sticker shock I’ve seen results from someone who doesn’t really understand cloud trying to build on the cloud. Cost has to be designed in from the start (in addition to security, operational overhead, etc).

In general, I’ve found two types of engineering teams who don’t use the cloud: the mugs and the superstars. And since superstars are few and far between, that means…

Sounds like we need a specialist.

I guess those promises about needing fewer expensive people never materialised.

tbh, aside from the really anaemic use-cases where everything actually manages to scale to zero and has very low load: I have genuinely never seen an AWS project (outside of free credits of course) that works out cheaper than what came before.

That's TCO from PNLs, not a "gut feeling". We have a decade of evidence now.

... you failed at reading comprehension?

My comment was not about using AWS is bad, it has its uses. My comment was about how in this instance it was simply not needed. And I even speculated when it might be needed.

To pick the correct tool for the job, is what, it means to be an Engineer, or a person with common sense. With experience, we can get over childish absolutions of a tool or service, and look at the broader aspects, unless, of course, we are expecting some kind of monetary gains.

What are some cheaper and better hosting providers that you can recommend?

Hetzner! They do ask for ID though.

Hetzner.

For most public cloud providers you have to give them your credit card number so they can charge an arbitrary amount.

For Hetzner, instead of CC#, you give a scan of your ID (of course you can attach your CC too or Paypal). Personally I do my payments via a bank transfer. I recently paid for the whole 2025 and 2026 for all my k8s clusters. It gives unimaginable peace of mind when compared to AWS/GCP/Azure.

Plus, their cloud instances often spin up much faster than EC2.

I have used Knownhost previously, it served me really well.

Before that, I used to go for Linode, but I think they've become more pricey?

Linode was bought by Akamai. They immediately raised prices, and they have been, if anything, less reliable.

Ahh, yes, I remember now! I think it's almost 8 years now? Stopped using them after the buy out.

Too bad, actually, their service was pretty good.

For bare metal I’ve been using tier.net to get 192 GB RAM, 4TB NVME and 32 cores for $219/mo.

Data centers all over the country and I get to locate under 10ms from my regional audience.

Just a data point if you want some bigger iron than a VM.

Saving $75 a month at what cost in labour?

You actually save on labour. A VPS is a lot less work than anything involving AWS console.

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