Hacker News Reader

Comment by AJRF | Hacker News Reader

AWS / GCP / Azure aren't for individuals or small businesses. They won't tell you this anywhere, and they won't stop you from signing up - but they simply do not care one iota about users with anything less than $100k billing per month.

They treat big account owners like kings, they fly them out to Formula 1 events, they get 3 day workshops in swanky retreats, because a few k spent on this equals maybe millions of dollars.

If they respond to a small business quicker they don't get anything from it. They collect a bill that if it went missing they wouldn't notice.

I am not saying this is right - but people running small businesses on these platforms are operating under false pretenses.

View on HN

Used to be different when AWS started properly 20 years ago with S3 and EC2. But yes they went from catering to startups to SMBs to enterprise.

Unfortunately a lot of developers still believe the AWS / GCP / Azure propaganda (tech evangelism, cloud advocacy, or whatever else you're calling it). Nowadays you shouldn't use them at all when starting up.

What should someone use? Selfhost? Cheap VPS? Genuinely curious to hear your thoughts.

Same thing we did before aws was invented... cloud is just a managed server half the time, not really anything new. And what kind of IT professional is daunted by bread and butter shit like running a server? That's like an accountant that outsources the accounting to someone else cos "it's too complex"

> And what kind of IT professional is daunted by bread and butter shit like running a server?

You’re serious and not acting in jest? Because people focus on their core competencies. Self hosting server infrastructure, or even self-administration via VPS or whatever, is orthogonal to the service being delivered to users.

Calling it “bread and butter” is some form of irony as those jobs are mostly gone now, it’s a data center monkeys job that maintains 10,000 servers across countless unknown clients.

> is orthogonal to the service being delivered to users.

Not if they need a server. I think you might be imagining this from an MSP perspective.

> Because people focus on their core competencies

The IT department handles the computers, it's always been that way. There is no group more competent at it than the IT guys.

> those jobs are mostly gone now, it’s a data center monkeys job

Onprem is still very much a thing, especially since AWS and VMware became expensive in the last couple of years.

The local/cloud thing is cyclical (started with mainframes, went to the pc, then back to the cloud) and I reckon with the cost of ai tokens the push back to local will be led by people running their own ai farms

Smaller, cheaper providers like OVH or Hetzner.

All good points. What do you recommend for the "small potatoes"?

Hetzner. You won't get much better support, and you will have to deal with EU legislative nonsense, but it won't be hard to do that if you are actually small.

Why do I say Hetzner?

It's very budget friendly and has a very small list of services so its much harder to screw yourself into a situation where its hard to leave.

For individuals, probably.

For SMBs spending $10k - $100k a month, I would absolutely advise against that.

A lot of those are spending 10-100k a month when they could be spending 1k-10k a month with a more lean infra

Why is that? I've seen couple of small firms using hetzner very successfully and saving a lot of money compared to whatever cloud offering.

Back when we were spending 100k/mo on AWS, I calculated that equivalent infra would be $15k-$20k/mo at Hetzner.

Hetzner has the most unintuitive UI out of any host I've ever used in 20+ yrs of using different web host. Spending hours trying to do basic things, and even AI couldnt help. Switched to one of their competitors after 2(!) days of trouble shooting and got the same basic task done in ~10 mins.

    > Hetzner has the most unintuitive UI out of any host

This is the first negative thing about Hetzner I have read on HN. Does anyone else dis/agree?

    > one of their competitors

Can you share which one?

Digital Ocean. I should add going into the whole situation I had a positive feelings about Hetzner and negative feelings about Digital Ocean. It's why I tried Hetzner first. I didnt like D.O. or want to use them. But in the end their interface was way easier to work with.

I've been using Scaleway and cannot complain yet, don't know their region reach though..

I chose Digital Ocean. I just need a tiny Debian server I can run a couple self-managed services on and DO gave me exactly that for $4/mo.

I was with Azure before that and good lord was that a mistake. Miserable experience if all you need is a single VM.

I built a small project on Cloudflare and it just works. I've had only one issue where I ended up contacting support and they were very prompt in addressing it.

I'd go with a smaller VPS-focused provider like Vultr.

OVH - they are cheaper than AWS and bound by the EU privacy law (GDPR).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com