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Comment by carlm42 | Hacker News Reader

On Hetzner you will be on the hook for managing the database though, and DBA is most certainly a full-time job if you have a serious use-case for it.

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1 GB of RAM for Postgres is really only useful for tinkering IMHO. Even for development, you’ll quickly need more memory, so HA doesn’t provide much value here. If you go with something even remotely reasonable (4 GB RAM, 200 GB SSD, 1/2 vCPU — and that’s still on the low end), the cost jumps to about $290/month. For that price, you could easily hire someone to set up HA Postgres for you on Hetzner or OVH and once configured, HA Postgres typically requires minimal ongoing maintenance.

Also, this is a shared server, not a truly dedicated one like you’d get with bare-metal providers. So, calling it "Metal" might be misleading marketing trick, but if you want someone to always blame and don’t mind overpaying for that comfort, then the managed option might be the right thing.

Considering they are charging an unfathomable $4529/mo for 256 GB databases, extrapolating that to a serious use case you can indeed just hire someone full-time with how much you'd save. And then you'll actually have someone who understands how databases work instead of treating it like an expensive black box.

edit: my bad that's the price for 256GB RAM.

Cloud databases have been pricey for a while.

The reality most databases are tiny as shit and most apps can tolerate the massive latency that the cloud provider dbs offer.

It is why it is sorta funny we are rediscovering non network attached storage is faster.

Yeah per your edit that'd be for 256GB RAM which puts that into serious dollar category. For comparison I checked what AWS asks for for the same spec and that'd be $4616/month (for a db.m8gd.16xlarge), and that doesn't even yield you an actual NVMe. You can of course build the same for cheaper on Hetzner but again then you're on the hook also for the operations of the thing, which at that size is possibly non-trivial.

> $4529/month... can indeed just hire someone full-time

That's $54,348/year, not including the cost of benefits, not including stock compensation. Let's say you reserve 20% for benefits and that comes out to $43,478.40 in salary.

Besides the benefit of not needing the management / communication overhead of hiring somebody, do you know any DBAs willing to take a full-time job for $43,478.40 in salary?

Missed the 'extrapolating' part -- for 3x that, absolutely.

But that's the point, innit? How many SMEs need multiple production databases of that size? Nobody's really suggesting that Fortune 500 size enterprises should get by without DBAs. There's a big difference between an enterprise paying for a DBA take care of fleets of production databases, compared to a <50 employee shop that should do just fine with a single production database.

I think this product is mostly only viable in NA market where the SDE wage is much higher than European one to justify spending $x/mo for DBaaS instead of hosting their own

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