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Comment by theideaofcoffee | Hacker News Reader

This concern troll that everyone trots out when anyone brings up running their own gear is just exhausting. The hyperscalers have melted people’s brains to a point where they can’t even fathom running shit for themselves.

Yes, drives are going to fail. Yes, power supplies are going to burn out. Yes, god, you’re going to get new parts. Yes, you will have to actually talk to vendors.

Big. Deal. This shit is -not- hard.

For the amount of money you save by doing it like that, you should be clamoring to do it yourself. The concern trolling doesn’t make any sort of argument against it, it just makes you look lazy.

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Very good point. There was something on the HN front page like this about self-hosted email, too.

I point out to people that AWS is between ten to one hundred times more expensive than a normal server. The response is "but what if I only need it to handle peak load three hours a day?" Then you still come out ahead with your own server.

We have multiple colo cages. We handle enough traffic - terabytes per second - that we'll never move those to cloud. Yet management always wants more cloud. While simultaneously complaining about how we're not making enough money.

I don't think the answer is so black-and-white. IMO This only realistically applies to larger companies or ones that either push lots of traffic or have a need for large amounts of compute/storage/etc.

But for smaller groups that don't have large/sustained workloads, I think they can absolutely save money compared to colo/dedicated servers using one of multiple different kinds of AWS services.

I have several customers that coast along just fine with a $50/mo EC2 instance or less, compared to hundreds per month for a dedicated server... I wouldn't call that "ten times" by any stretch.

Small companies should go for the likes of Hetzner/OVH, which is still 10+ times cheaper than AWS.

AWS is for anyone with a fear of committing to a particular amount of resource use, but once you've tried both and realised the price and performance differential, you realize you can easily way overcommit and still come out ahead, so it's not actually that scary. Plus, nobody's stopping you from continuing to spin up EC2s when your real servers are fully utilized.

Hard disagree... I think these black-and-white opinions are disingenuous, lack important nuance and are often just incorrect.

I even have customers on $3/mo EC2 instances... the cheapest dedicated server on OVH is still twenty times more expensive than that. I don't think there's any way to "come out on top" with OVH in that scenario, short of maybe claiming that the customer is somehow "doing it wrong" by only paying for what they need.

And yes hetzner/ovh have $3-4 cloud instances too, but now you're just directly competing with AWS and I don't see any benefit to call one any better than the other.

Thanks for this. I agree, there seems to be some sort of resistance to building and maintaining a CoLo infrastructure. In reality, it is not too difficult. As I mentioned above, spare parts on the shelve with the CoLo "remote hands" support and a good monitoring system can lessen the impact of almost any catastrophic issue.

For the record, I have built (and currently maintain) a number of CoLo deployments. Our systems have been running for +10 years with very little failure of either drives or PSUs. In fact, our PSU failure rate is probably 1 every 3-4 years, and we probably loose a couple of drives per year. All in all, the systems are very reliable.

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