3 ms·

Can't you just, like, go dedicated first ? Or better, start dedicated and turn up cloud every day at 6pm when your traffic is 10x (really, none explained how th

Can't you just, like, go dedicated first ? Or better, start dedicated and turn up cloud every day at 6pm when your traffic is 10x (really, none explained how they can scale their db that fast(because you can't), only the app-tier, which is probably badly-designed to be that slow).

CaveTech 10y ago
The problem is that cloud providers build services and solutions outside of simple server space. AWS for example has some killer apps with S3, RDS, ELB, Kinesis, etc. Yes there's open source alternatives for all of those, but they bring on huge operational costs.
api 10y ago
Tangent but: Is anyone else noticing that bare metal is getting unbelievably cheap? OVH is well known but there are now many vendors also offering crazy cheap bare metal hosting with <1hr setup times, etc. Compared to the popular virtualized cloud vendors it's a steal, especially when it comes to CPU, RAM, and storage. (Bandwidth tends to be about the same.)
- zaroth 10y ago
  Paying by the Mbps is a lot cheaper at scale than paying by the GB, so I wouldn't even dismiss the cost benefit for bandwidth either. If all you need or want is hardware, power, and bandwidth I would say you should definitely go dedicated or colo. If your business runs on the value-added services than you don't really have that choice.
- qaq 10y ago
  Bandwidth is drastically cheaper than AWS
  - jacques_chester 10y ago
    It's not quite apples-to-apples. Bare-metal and VPS providers lump all traffic together into a single pool. If you do that with an IaaS, you're nuts. Your static assets (which typically represent the bulk of bytes served) should be served from a blobstore or a CDN, which are priced dramatically cheaper. If your mp4s are served from an EC2 instance instead of S3 or CloudFront, for example, you're keeping warm by setting $100 bills on fire.
    - qaq 10y ago
      S3 10TB transfer 902.16 from dedicated provider 60
      - e12e 10y ago
        Take serverloft as an example - not a low-cost provider. With your 99$/month server with a 1gps uplink you get "flat bandwidth": "Fair Use Policy Use as much bandwidth as required: With all dedicated servers from serverloft, you receive a traffic flat rate free of charge. Here our Fair Use Policy applies, which requires a fair usage of all our resources as well as a reasonable traffic usage. Therefore, in case the bandwidth exceeds 50 TB on a 1 Gbit/s server during the current billing month, we will decrease the bandwidth to 100 Mbit/s. You will be able to monitor you current usage in the customer panel. We will also inform you via e-mail should you approach the 50 TB maximum usage. In this case you can purchase additional bandwidth for $10 per TB in order to extend your traffic usage." So, 99 for the server and 50TB a month. Now if you want to max out your 1gpbs connection, lets say 50% of max (1gbps * 24 * 30 * 60 * 60s/2 TB ~ 160 TB, or a additional commitment of 110 * 10 = 1100+99 = grand total of 1200 dollars a month. How much transfer does that get you out of s3? First off, 160TB out of S3 each month, clocks in at 13227$ for just the bandwidth - not including the any storage. For the price of 160TB on dedicated, you get approximately 12TB on s3 (again without storage). 120TB out from cloudfront? 25693/month. Now, one, low-end box might not be enough to keep everything going, but notice the price difference here. If you bought four "low-end" boxes you'd get 200TB of bandwidth included, and still be paying a lot less than for just the bandwidth on S3. It might even be cheaper to rent dedicated boxes set up as caching proxies, than to serve your data from s3/cloud-front... Now, I'm not saying the cloud doesn't have merit, but just pointing out that the price difference is real.
        qaq 10y ago
        that was exactly my point :)
        e12e 10y ago
        Indeed :-) I just felt the need to go and look at some current numbers, from a more expensive host than what I currently use (happy hetzner customer here).

CaveTech 10y ago

The problem is that cloud providers build services and solutions outside of simple server space. AWS for example has some killer apps with S3, RDS, ELB, Kinesis, etc. Yes there's open source alternatives for all of those, but they bring on huge operational costs.

api 10y ago

Tangent but: Is anyone else noticing that bare metal is getting unbelievably cheap? OVH is well known but there are now many vendors also offering crazy cheap bare metal hosting with <1hr setup times, etc. Compared to the popular virtualized cloud vendors it's a steal, especially when it comes to CPU, RAM, and storage. (Bandwidth tends to be about the same.)

zaroth 10y ago
Paying by the Mbps is a lot cheaper at scale than paying by the GB, so I wouldn't even dismiss the cost benefit for bandwidth either. If all you need or want is hardware, power, and bandwidth I would say you should definitely go dedicated or colo. If your business runs on the value-added services than you don't really have that choice.
qaq 10y ago
Bandwidth is drastically cheaper than AWS
- jacques_chester 10y ago
  It's not quite apples-to-apples. Bare-metal and VPS providers lump all traffic together into a single pool. If you do that with an IaaS, you're nuts. Your static assets (which typically represent the bulk of bytes served) should be served from a blobstore or a CDN, which are priced dramatically cheaper. If your mp4s are served from an EC2 instance instead of S3 or CloudFront, for example, you're keeping warm by setting $100 bills on fire.
  - qaq 10y ago
    S3 10TB transfer 902.16 from dedicated provider 60
    - e12e 10y ago
      Take serverloft as an example - not a low-cost provider. With your 99$/month server with a 1gps uplink you get "flat bandwidth": "Fair Use Policy Use as much bandwidth as required: With all dedicated servers from serverloft, you receive a traffic flat rate free of charge. Here our Fair Use Policy applies, which requires a fair usage of all our resources as well as a reasonable traffic usage. Therefore, in case the bandwidth exceeds 50 TB on a 1 Gbit/s server during the current billing month, we will decrease the bandwidth to 100 Mbit/s. You will be able to monitor you current usage in the customer panel. We will also inform you via e-mail should you approach the 50 TB maximum usage. In this case you can purchase additional bandwidth for $10 per TB in order to extend your traffic usage." So, 99 for the server and 50TB a month. Now if you want to max out your 1gpbs connection, lets say 50% of max (1gbps * 24 * 30 * 60 * 60s/2 TB ~ 160 TB, or a additional commitment of 110 * 10 = 1100+99 = grand total of 1200 dollars a month. How much transfer does that get you out of s3? First off, 160TB out of S3 each month, clocks in at 13227$ for just the bandwidth - not including the any storage. For the price of 160TB on dedicated, you get approximately 12TB on s3 (again without storage). 120TB out from cloudfront? 25693/month. Now, one, low-end box might not be enough to keep everything going, but notice the price difference here. If you bought four "low-end" boxes you'd get 200TB of bandwidth included, and still be paying a lot less than for just the bandwidth on S3. It might even be cheaper to rent dedicated boxes set up as caching proxies, than to serve your data from s3/cloud-front... Now, I'm not saying the cloud doesn't have merit, but just pointing out that the price difference is real.
      - qaq 10y ago
        that was exactly my point :)
        e12e 10y ago
        Indeed :-) I just felt the need to go and look at some current numbers, from a more expensive host than what I currently use (happy hetzner customer here).