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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

> My 4565p is a $500 cpu... 32 vcpus... racked in a datacenter. The machine cost under 2k.

> The cloud provider charging $140 / mo for 3x less vcpus you break even in a couple months, it doesn't matter if it dies a few months later

How do you calculate break even in a couple months if the machine costs $2,000 and you still have to pay colo fees?

If your colo fees were $100 month you wouldn’t break even for over 4 years. You could try to find cheaper colocation but even with free colocation your example doesn’t break even for over a year.

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the 140/mo is for 3x less vcpu, so $420/mo savings if you use all those same cores. sorry for the poor comparison wording there. in a few months already up to $1300+ by 6 months already paid the machine.

colo fees are cheap if you need more than just 1u. even with a 50-100 fee you easily get way more performance and come ahead within a year

> by 6 months already paid the machine.

You originally said “a couple months” but now it’s 6 months and assumption of $0 collocation fees which isn’t realistic

In my experience situations rarely call for precisely 32 cores for a fixed period of 3 years to support calculations like this anyway. We start with a small set of cloud servers and scale them up as traffic grows. Today’s tooling makes it easy to auto scale throughout the day, even.

When trying to rack a server everyone aims higher because it sucks to start running into limits unexpectedly and be stuck on a server that wasn’t big enough to handle the load. Then you have to start considering having at least two servers in case one starts failing.

Racking a single self-built server is great for hobby projects but it’s always more complicated for serving real business workloads.

Don't nit-pick the "couple". It was used casually - like to mean not terribly long time. So the 2-6 spread, while technically big, is still just a trifle. While I'm nit-picking; up thread is talking about a limited box for CI and you're talking about scaling up real business workloads. That's just like the difference between 2 and 6. Give it a rest.

Everyone: run your scenarios and expectations in a spreadsheet and then use real data to run your CBA. Your case will be unique(ish) so make your case for your situation.

> So the 2-6 spread, while technically big, is still just a trifle.

I think you’re misreading. Even the 6 month thread was based on invalid assumptions of $0 collocation fees. Add in even cheap collocation fees and it’s pushed out even further

That’s not really a nit pick when the claims were based on impossible math. It’s more of a Motte and Bailey where they come in with a “couple of months” claim that sounds awesome on the surface but then falls back to a completely different number if anyone looks at the details.

It’s even dumber than that.

Let’s not forget that if even three engineers are working on this migration for only a week your cost is now 10’s of thousands for this couple hundred euros cost saving.

(assuming avg all-in engineer costs in europe)

It makes no sense to optimise cost for infrastructure mostly, it does make sense to make it faster, since almost all your spend is on engineers.

Spending thousands to save hundreds is not a healthy business.

yeah thanks for that i was just meaning a very fast return

You can take a hybrid approach and use the rack for base capacity, cloud for scaling.

minor point to say but I have seen in some locations colocation costs to be around $30-40 as well. $100 is usually reserved for say colocating within Hetzner for example (iirc)

Just as a rule of thumb, if your servers cost more than 1k$ per month or even 500$ maybe even, depending upon if you are okay with colocation and everything. I have found it to break even (more than even the cheapest say hetzner or similar actually so for GCP or anything which charge significantly more, maybe you should warrant a deeper analysis on what is better colocation or dedicated servers or for short burstable units maybe even vps)

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