t_sawyer

This is paywalled. Without reading the article, I don't think Americans are fighting data centers because of AI.

I think they're fighting data centers because many cities have already allowed new data center builds (even before AI exploded) and now realize these massive profit making companies are contaminating local water supplies, not providing any jobs outside of a temporary boom of construction jobs, and are causing their power bills to increase while also making their local grids more fragile.

I've run an Openstack cloud. Local to the host NVME's directly attached to VMs is unbeatable. All clouds offer this. But that storage is ephemeral and it was when I implemented it in Openstack too.

There's not enough redundancy. You could raid1 those NVME's when before they get attached to a VM and that helps with hardware failures, but you get less of them to attach. Even if you RAID them, there's not a good way to move that VM to another host if there's a RAM or CPU or other hardware issue on that host.

These VM's with NVME's directly attached have to basically be treated as bare metal servers and you have to do redundancy at the application layer (like database replication).

But again, all of the major cloud services offer these types of machines if you NEED NVME IO speed. There are quirks though. For example, in Azure it seems like you have to be able to expect the VM to be moved whenever Azure feels like it and expect that ephemeral data to be wiped. Whereas in Openstack, we would do local block level migrations if we HAD to move the VM to another host. That block level migration required the VM to be turned off but it did copy the local NVME data to another host. If this happened it was all planned and the particular application had app level redundancy built in so it was not a problem. If the host crashed, that particular VM would just be down till the host was fixed and came back online.

GoPros are IP68 rated without a housing and have removable batteries. This is not an impossible task.

Phone makers do not want you to be able to replace batteries easily because it will extend the life of a phone. End of story.

Well this kinda screws me over running docker on macos. Not all images I use have an arm version.

Yes it's hypocritical to push customers to pay you more money with best practices for uptime when you yourself don't follow them and your choices to not follow them actually make the best practices you pushed your customers to pay you more money for not fully work.

Hey! Pay us more money so when us-east-1 goes down you're not down (actually you'll still go down because us-east-1 is a single point of failure even for our other regions).

There's multiple single points of failure for their entire cloud in us-east-1.

I think it's hypocritical for them to push customers to double or triple their spend in AWS when they themselves have single points of failure on a single region.

Yeah because Amazon engineers are hypocrites. They want you to spend extra money for region failover and multi-az deploys but they don't do it themselves.

While I agree, we saw this play out with Dropbox too.

Google already has the ad network. They already have Gemini. IMO this will end up being OpenAI proving that the revenue model works and then Google will swoop in and take their market share away.

PlanetScale created a business and profited off of an open source product called vitess from Google which is why they originally only supported mysql. Would love for them to open source their solution for postgres.

Which… while we’re at it. Gaming would be much better if consoles didn’t exist anymore. Games would be more optimized for PC and manufacturers would just be building prebuilt gaming PCs.

We also would have more Switch competition in the ARM gaming space instead of x64 handhelds and Android windows emulation if these walled gardens didn’t exist.

The biggest issue I have had with Hetzner was with a dedicated server. I was constantly (3 times or more a week) getting abuse messages about my MAC address not being correct:

"""" We have detected that your server is using different MAC addresses from those allowed by your Robot account.

Please take all necessary measures to avoid this in the future and to solve the issue. We also request that you send a short response to us. This response should contain information about how this could have happened and what you intend to do about it. In the event that the following steps are not completed successfully, your server can be locked at any time after DATEHERE.

How to proceed: - Solve the issue - Please note, in case you have fixed the problem, please wait at least 10 minutes before rechecking: https://abuse.hetzner.com/retries/?token=TOKENHERE - After successfully testing that the issue is resolved, send us a statement by using the following link: https://abuse.hetzner.com/statements/?token=TOKENHERE

Please visit our FAQ here, if you are unsure how to proceed: https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/dedicated-server/faq/error-fa... """

I was just using standard Docker to host a web app. No proxmox or KVM of any sort. I would just wait the 10 minutes, click their link https://abuse.hetzner.com/retries/?token=TOKENHERE, which would retry and would come back fine and my response would be "I changed nothing and the retry came back solved. I've done tcpdumps over a weeks time to see if any MAC addresses leak from the OS and none have while a similar ticket like this gets opened every couple days." The ticket would close shortly after I submitted.

I inquired to them at least twice about this and they just kept telling me I was leaking a MAC address that I wasn't allowed to even when I had proof of tcpdumps over a week time period. I found someone else who had this issue with them (most issues around this that I found were people hosting Proxmox) and they had Hetzner replace the NIC and it fixed the issue. Well, Hetzner wouldn't replace my NIC because "it was working" even though I referenced these abuse tickets. I ended up getting another dedicated server, migrated my app over there, and I haven't had issues since.

Their support is seriously not very good. Since that experience, I have had backups elsewhere and test restoring those backups regularly. The price to performance I get from them is unbeatable and like I said, I haven't had issues since getting a new machine. But, I'm definitely cautious and don't exactly trust things to not go sideways even though it's been 2 years since that experience.

You are correct. The Mayor of the city said the data stolen was either encrypted or corrupted and unusable. The mayor also refused to confirm something had taken place for weeks.

I’ve been following this since early August because I grew up in Columbus and still have family there.

Ginther is a terrible mayor and has handled this mess about as poorly as you can. The researcher they’re trying to quiet exposed that Ginther was lying about the data being unusable.

Different levels of encryption at rest play different roles in your particular scenario.

If you use a cloud service and they have an encryption at rest feature that you enable, the default is for them to control the key. Or, for Azure, put a "customer controlled" key in Key Vault. But again, that's their service. In this scenario you're only protected against people physically in the data centers not their DevOps folks. But, that feature gives you a checkmark for SOC2 or other regulations...

The problem protecting against DevOps folks at a cloud is: 1. You are burdened with putting a key somewhere outside of their cloud. If you do something at the filesystem level like enable bitlocker on a VM you're going to experience pain during reboots and it's not possible on a root volume if you're not given a console. 2. You can't do this on a cloud service like RDS. You'd have to do row level encryption with your application doing the decryption/encryption. But, your application has to have the key and now your back to #1. The VM with the key needs the root disk encrypted or the drive where the key is store encrypted. And again, you're not able to use a cloud service like EKS or App Service you're stuck with VMs.

Generally, I tend to just stick with regulation requirements which protect against the physical hard disk.

Then people will use Apple Music which is exactly the leverage Apple has. Apple let Spotify test the market of music streaming. Entered the market at basically the same price. Then charges Spotify 27% to compete with them directly.

Been using Joplin as my main note app for over 2 years.

IOS, Web Clipper, and Windows clients. Synced to Nextcloud.

I do wish there was a webapp for me to see my notes in a browser but I understand the way it works how that would be difficult to create due to the use use of local files and syncing.

Reddit wants to make money on the backs of their unpaid mods. I really don’t like them, but: Reddit has a ton of infrastructure costs they need to cover due to the centralization of these communities.

I do not like telegram or discord communities due to history issues. Same with Facebook. Reddit posts popping up on Google searches is really great.

I really wish we could go back to forums. The thing Reddit gave us was a central place to find communities as well as a unified login and feed. I feel like an aggregator of forums could help with finding communities. Forums that support oauth and rss would help bridge the gap of unified login and a central feed. The nice thing about forums is that their infra costs only need to scale with their community.

But background tasks are a thing. You could add a webhook endpoint to your monolith that writes a background job. Then your background worker (running on the same ec2 because it’s hardware requirements look pretty low at $2 a month in lambda) runs the job. $2 a month is now $0 since it’s running next to your monolith on the VM you’re already paying for.

How far does this go? If you have a riding lawnmower you have to change the oil in that too. Are we forcing people to spend money to haul their mower to a shop to get the oil changed? ATVs?

I'm completely against this. You're expecting poor people to pay for things they can do themselves if they're willing just because a few people dump oil in their weeds at night. Your freon argument doesn't sway me either. Wrecks cause freon dumps all the time. Your neighbor pulling freon out of one car isn't causing that much environment damage.

Also: if you're concerned about it, report them.

I'm losing track on when we should trust cops to ignore or doubt things and when we shouldn't.

Normal car power steering operates with a rubber belt that can break at any time. It's being fixed just like you may have to fix a serpentine belt one day.

I had a terrible experience too. The UI is incredibly slow and personally, I had issues where the "local db" had to be constantly repaired. The tool is just buggy and doesn't work well IMO.

FWIW: I ran it on 3 separate Windows PCs for around 6 months without any real luck getting it to work consistently.

Yes sorry TOTP.

Are you advocating for OTP 2FA? If so, your concern about losing your phone and losing access to your accounts is still an issue.

At the end of the day, OTP is more secure for the obvious issue with mobile carriers being phished into SIM jacking. But, I've personally had 0 luck convincing any business person that OTP is the best thing to use because (and this is a true statement) users are dumb and lazy and don't want to go through the process of downloading an app on their phone and setting up OTP. Plugging in your phone number for SMS is way easier.

They recently increased prices to account for an increase for them on electric costs.

Their business model is sound especially for the server auction dedicated servers.

All that to say I hear your worry but I’m not worried. Hell I was paying more than double on heroku for MUCH less compute resources. So if they double their prices I’d still be ahead.

I’m personally very happy with switching to a Hetzner dedicated server, I’m saving a ton of money, and the server can handle my busiest months of load with plenty of room to spare.

I use docker containers for a rails app and send backups of my db to S3 with restic. Docker compose files and DR scripts are in my repo. If Hetzner goes down I’ll run them on a VPS from any of the million providers.

Deploys push a docker container to dockerhub, then ssh into Hetzner and pulls them.

If you want the ease of git push deploys similar to Heroku then use Dokku.

Everyone should remember how long it took Heroku to tell you your environment variables were stolen in a breach and how they were not transparent at all through the whole process.

It’s not the charging that made me leave.

It was the security breach where all of my environment variables were stolen. And the amount of time it took and their level of transparency through it all.

No real reason other than the fact that I already had an AWS account and I was saving quite a bit of money already.

I may look into B2 later. But again, I’m well below my original costs so I may not look for a while.

I moved to a Hetzner dedicated instance with cloudflare in front. Rails Postgres memcached all run on docker.

Vs

Heroku with cloudflare in front Postgres from heroku and memcached with an add on.

1. Very little. I put the app in docker a long time ago for local development but still used heroku for prod. I dumped my db and imported it into a docker run db on Hetzner. One thing to note: I did not expose the db to the internet. The app connects to the db over a docker network.

2. I do DevOps for a living.

3. It did not add to my learning.

4. $30/month for a large Hetzner dedicated instance and $12 for S3 (backups) vs $25 for the app (I added 2 more for 8 hours a day during busy season) and $25 for a job runner and whatever they were charging for DB. My total cost now is $42/month and on Heroku it was around $120 during busy season and $100 during non busy season.

5. Rails Postgres memcached and delayed job. I had to expand my app tier during busy season by up to 3 instances (winter). With my load testing the Hetzner instance handles much more than the 3 instances ever did in my load testing.

6. I added db dump cron jobs along with restic backups to S3.