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Comment by rantfoil | Hacker News Reader

This is pretty cool, but for a startup at scale it still makes way more sense to own / operate on your own. For instance for a quadruple extra large instance (68GB) it would cost about $27k a year. Considering you'll want to do master-master for uptime, that's $60k out the door every year for two of these bad boys.

Vs owning it... can get a decent dual master setup for a fraction of that.

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Run the numbers when you consider bandwidth, spare parts, cost of employees who run out to colos in the middle of the night, flexibility. Compared to our current hosting (SoftLayer) for a site that does several million pageviews a day, the spreadsheet doesn't flip until you have hundreds of servers. One big difference though is that bandwidth at SoftLayer is rolled in, this would make Amazon hosting quite a bit more expensive.

Owning it is only part of the equation, think about hosting (you dont want to host your servers in your house on a DSL line), power usage (those bad boys will use a lot more then your desktop PC), cooling (they tend to get warm), backup solutions (an extra server, tape-libraries etc), maintenance (your super servers will break down at times) etc.

$60K a year is peanuts for most companies.

I'm facing this right now.

I just bought 6 1U servers for almost nothing for one of the companies I work with, and now we have to figure out where to put them. We had a free 1U rack space before, but we're unsure if we'll be able to get 6U of space for free.

If not, CoLo spots aren't all that cheap. Putting them in someone's house isn't an option and we don't have much money.

Sure we had the money to buy the servers (some were $100/each used from another company that was switching to EC2)- but I don't have 100's/month for racking each of them nearby. We're a super-small company without much capital and zero investment right now. Totally bootstrapped and paying for stuff via consulting. There's no way in hell we have a 60K budget and if we bring in that much total in the next 9 months I'd be happy.

Go to webhostingtalk.com and look around. There are places that will host 1U for $50 each including bandwidth and remote reboot support.

Thanks! I was talking to a friend that runs a small CoLo and it was looking like $200-400/month for each server, depending on options.

> hosting, power usage, cooling

These are all the same thing, in the sense that they're all included by a colo provider, and even high-end colocation space will save you a ton over AWS.

> backup solutions (an extra server, tape-libraries etc)

Grandparent talked about server-level redundancy.

> maintenance (your super servers will break down at times)

24h on-site service is a standard option on server-class hardware, and not all that expensive.

> $60K a year is peanuts for most companies.

It's peanuts for large companies, but they already have their own ops departments and won't shy away from the details of handling a little hardware. Smaller companies will be acutely aware that $60k/yr is a good fraction of the cost of hiring another developer (or marketer).

Server level redundancy isn't backup, just as RAID isn't backup. If there's a mistake, or software-caused data corruption then you still lose.

I don't really agree with you unless you work for a very large company that has an economy of scale.

Think you can compete with AppEngine for cost per computation/bandwidth/storage? Developing for AppEngine is a bit restrictive, and Amazon provides much more flexibility for not too much more money for computation/bandwidth/storage.

Also, Amazon associated services like S3 and SimpleDB really are inexpensive for what you get.

I used to base my consulting business on deploying customer aps to VPSs or cheap servers. I think that Amazon and Google AppEngine are the future.

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