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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

Cloud didn’t suddenly invent renting servers in a data center. More importantly capex vs opex is generally in favor of Capex for stable companies like Hospitals. Middlemen always want their cut so you pay the full lifetime cost, plus transaction costs, and on top of that profit for those companies.

> The hard truth is that self-hosting only brings in meaningful improvements in cost if your operation grows beyond a certain scale

What nonsense, I’ve seen many small projects with ~500/month in hosting costs including manpower lose tons of money by trying to go with cloud services. Self hosting scales down ridiculously far because you need talent but your server guy can do other things when they don’t need to mess with servers for months on end.

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Cloud did bring with it the ability to quickly terminate an instance and no longer be billed for it. Renting equipment meant that equipment was your expense whether it was being used or not. So many people focus on cloud allowing one to scale up quickly, but to me being allowed to scale down just as quickly was the changer. Think of your local Target with 40 lanes of check out but with only 4 lanes open until the holidays where all 40 are open. During the remaining 10 months, they are stuck with unused square footage. That's what lease gear in your colo looks like to the bottom line.

The only thing that cloud brought is the possibility to spend less for smart people/companies that have the right workload. At the (hidden) expenses of the other clients that are not so smart or don't actually need that elasticity. Yes, there are economies of scale at AWS but in the end there is fixed capacity that either gets used or not.

Paying 2x as much per server means you need to drop well below half just to break even. But you always need a server or you can’t handle new requests. So at small scale there’s zero benefit from dynamic loads.

> you always need a server or you can’t handle new requests

You don’t always need a server, you could also just go serverless, get charged 10x while you make your architecture a distributed, slow, hard to debug mess.

Yea, just don’t ask what’s listening for those requests.

please bro just one more SQS queue bro I swear bro just one more please bro

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