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I worked on a project that costs about $5k/month to self-host. After moving it to AWS, it was about $2k/month. So $36k/year savings in hosting costs. In our cas

I worked on a project that costs about $5k/month to self-host. After moving it to AWS, it was about $2k/month. So $36k/year savings in hosting costs. In our case outgoing bandwidth at AWS was about 10x cheaper than what our ISP offered. Having spent years help running a physical hosting company, working with virtualized servers saves LOTS of time. I still find it amazing and much, much cheaper in staff-hours to reboot a cluster and have it come back up on 2x larger hardware when a project grows.

CaptSpify 10y ago
Right, I'm not saying hosted solutions are never the answer, they are just less often the answer than people seem to think. Too many people buy into the cloud-hype, and never look at the numbers until it's too late. And that doesn't even touch the trust you have to have in your provider. And I love virtual more than physical. But I set up my own virtual server and run them myself.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- oneloop 10y ago
  > And I love virtual more than physical. But I set up my own virtual server and run them myself. Where do you keep the machines? In your bedroom?
  - CaptSpify 10y ago
    Depends if you mean for work or home. For work, we have a DC. For home, yes, I keep them in my office.
    - oneloop 10y ago
      You're paying for a super ninja ultra special internet connection as well? Yikes. Interesting concept though. So your strategy for scaling up is building a data center then?
      - CaptSpify 10y ago
        > You're paying for a super ninja ultra special internet connection as well? Not really. Just a normal home connection. If you design your services sanely, and don't have much traffic, it's not really an issue. > So your strategy for scaling up is building a data center then? Well, it depends. You really should do a cost-benefit analysis, because each product is different. But if it makes sense, then yes.
        oneloop 10y ago
        But your whole argument was that for some serious application you shouldn't trust on cloud services, wasn't it? The kind of things I was doing half a year ago you couldn't run on your home connection. So this whole "run important stuff on your home connection" is just a signal that you're not doing anything great.
        CaptSpify 10y ago
        > But your whole argument was that for some serious application you shouldn't trust on cloud services, wasn't it? Well, with everything, there are pros and cons. My argument is that I think it's silly to trust someone else with your infrastructure. There can be benefits to doing so, however, your giving up a lot as well. And in terms of cost (which is usually the main argument that I hear), I've personally never seen it work. Your trusting someone with something pretty critical with your business, so you should think long and hard about which direction you want to go. If your cloud-service gets arbitrarily shut down or has an outage, what responses can you take to fix it? Usually not many. Thats essentially adding a SPoF, which is generally considered a big no-no, although it does happen. > The kind of things I was doing half a year ago you couldn't run on your home connection. I'd be curious as to what your doing then. > just a signal that you're not doing anything great. I guess that depends on what you mean as great. I do a lot of useful stuff: email, web-apps, file-store, home-automation, etc.
jwatte 10y ago
That funny, because one of my beefs with Amazon is that they charge a lot for bandwidth! Once you're in a co-lo, high quality bandwidth just isn't that expensive.

CaptSpify 10y ago

Right, I'm not saying hosted solutions are never the answer, they are just less often the answer than people seem to think. Too many people buy into the cloud-hype, and never look at the numbers until it's too late. And that doesn't even touch the trust you have to have in your provider. And I love virtual more than physical. But I set up my own virtual server and run them myself.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
oneloop 10y ago
> And I love virtual more than physical. But I set up my own virtual server and run them myself. Where do you keep the machines? In your bedroom?
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  Depends if you mean for work or home. For work, we have a DC. For home, yes, I keep them in my office.
  - oneloop 10y ago
    You're paying for a super ninja ultra special internet connection as well? Yikes. Interesting concept though. So your strategy for scaling up is building a data center then?
    - CaptSpify 10y ago
      > You're paying for a super ninja ultra special internet connection as well? Not really. Just a normal home connection. If you design your services sanely, and don't have much traffic, it's not really an issue. > So your strategy for scaling up is building a data center then? Well, it depends. You really should do a cost-benefit analysis, because each product is different. But if it makes sense, then yes.
      - oneloop 10y ago
        But your whole argument was that for some serious application you shouldn't trust on cloud services, wasn't it? The kind of things I was doing half a year ago you couldn't run on your home connection. So this whole "run important stuff on your home connection" is just a signal that you're not doing anything great.
        CaptSpify 10y ago
        > But your whole argument was that for some serious application you shouldn't trust on cloud services, wasn't it? Well, with everything, there are pros and cons. My argument is that I think it's silly to trust someone else with your infrastructure. There can be benefits to doing so, however, your giving up a lot as well. And in terms of cost (which is usually the main argument that I hear), I've personally never seen it work. Your trusting someone with something pretty critical with your business, so you should think long and hard about which direction you want to go. If your cloud-service gets arbitrarily shut down or has an outage, what responses can you take to fix it? Usually not many. Thats essentially adding a SPoF, which is generally considered a big no-no, although it does happen. > The kind of things I was doing half a year ago you couldn't run on your home connection. I'd be curious as to what your doing then. > just a signal that you're not doing anything great. I guess that depends on what you mean as great. I do a lot of useful stuff: email, web-apps, file-store, home-automation, etc.

jwatte 10y ago

That funny, because one of my beefs with Amazon is that they charge a lot for bandwidth! Once you're in a co-lo, high quality bandwidth just isn't that expensive.