Comment by chops | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chops | Hacker News Reader

The only beef I have with cloud/VPS hosting is the price.

Conveniently, the data center I've worked with for years[1] supports a hybrid setup, where you can use their cloud hosting combined with coloed physical hardware all in the same VLAN. It's hugely effective, since I can have physical hardware there to deal with the high-load/high-memory stuff there (like database servers) affordably, while at the same time, using VPS for less processor intensive/more ephemeral-load type stuff like webservers.

The result is that I drive to Chicago to work on hardware significantly less frequently than I previously used to, and it's fully worth it. If their cloud system goes down for whatever reason, I know their staff is on it, and I'm not worried in the slightest.

When I was 100% hardware based, I lived in a bit of terror of being out of town. If something happens, I had to get there. Now if something happens while I'm out of town, as long as I have internet access, I'm okay with it. Eventually, when prices go down enough, I'll go 100% virtual, and I'm not looking back.

[1] Steadfast Networks in Chicago: http://www.steadfast.net

Are you considering you loss of time/freedom in that cost analysis? I get that cloud doesn't always make sense in every situation, but in a lot of cases people don't take into consideration these other factors (loss time managing/maintaining hardware, actual hardware costs, etc) when making the decision.

I would say that should always factor into these equations, and I further would say that most companies large enough to worry about these kinds of decisions are indeed factoring those things in.

The cloud vs colo discussions have been done before on HN, but I still say the decision of one versus the other basically boils down to a relatively simple if-else/switch statement: If size of company is small and no sysadmins, cloud. If size of company is medium and sysadmins then cloud or colo based on due-diligence. If size of company is large and sysadmins and you need very high uptime then colo (Unless you're willing to spend a gazillion dollars for several access zones on EC2). Obviously there are going to be lots of if/else chains but you get my drift I imagine.

Now if you're a small start-up and have a likely outcome of tons of scaling needed in short order, your best bet might very well be scaling with the cloud and moving to hardware when you're more established (and if it makes sense from a cost benefit analysis).

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