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I've always been set aback by how much AWS servers cost. Maybe I'm just too cheap but you can go to very reputable hosting companies and get things at fractions

I've always been set aback by how much AWS servers cost. Maybe I'm just too cheap but you can go to very reputable hosting companies and get things at fractions of the price. For example, if I need 16GB of memory and 4 cores here are my options: * AWS (t2.xlarge) $137.62 * OVH (EG-16) $79 * So You Start/OVH (SYS-IP-1S) $42 * Kimsufi/OVH (KS-3B) $29 * Hetzner (EX41) €46.41 [Lowest cost model is 32GB of ram] * Joe's Data Center (No model name) $45 [Duel socketed L5420 which is 8 cores] That's a crazy price difference and, unlike frmo what I understand about AWS, you don't need to pay for bandwith for most of these companies or they have some crazy high limit. IIRC it's common for 20TB to be the standard (FREE) bandwith limit. You're also on real hardware, not a VM. Unfortunately not all of these are perfect systems. There are issues with them. Some have slower CPUs, some have slower disks, some are in other countries but you can just pick the ones that suit your need for whatever you have to run. You can also use VMs that are far cheaper then these dedicated systems. If your workload is under 50% duty cycle on a CPU and under 4GB of memory you don't need a dedicated server. Buy a VM from one of these companies: * RamNode (8GB SVZS) $28 [Fully SSD storage, very fast network] * OVH (VPS CLOUD RAM 2) $22.39 [12GB(!) of ram and 2 vCores] * Linode (Linode 4GB) $20 These are all VPSs but they will get the job done and are cheap enough that you can build something great on a budget. This is just from a few minutes of remembering when I had to buy my own hardware. I'm sure this isn't an exhaustive list. You can usually find information on the web hosting talk forums and on a site called low end box. I don't have links on hand but they're worth a read.

bluedino 10y ago
AWS is so much more than servers. If you just want a server to run some stuff on, you're right, it's faster and cheaper to buy a dedicated server from a reseller. With Amazon you have so many options when it comes to storage, compute power, load balancing... They have a huge portfolio of products and you can get everything in one location from one vendor.
- zzzcpan 10y ago
  "With Amazon you have so many options when it comes to storage, compute power, load balancing..." It used to be different, but today their most important offerings have open source equivalents. They are essentially off the shelf, because for your own projects there is no need to care about abuse or noisy neighbors. Most importantly, though, it's going to be cheaper and you still will be able to use cloud where it shines.
  - zenlikethat 10y ago
    > It used to be different, but today their most important offerings have open source equivalents. Seriously? What about S3, RDS, VPC, IAM? The engineering $$$ (in time) to set up and maintain open source equivalents of these would not be cheap.
    - throwaway2048 10y ago
      AWS isnt cheap either
    - joelbondurant 10y ago
      S3 is shit compared to HDFS.
djchen 10y ago
Most of those providers you mentioned aren't as reliable and scalable as AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, etc. That isn't an apples to apples comparison. I would not want to host my business on So You Start, Kimsufi, Hetzner, and especially not Joe's Data Center. I have personally used Joes DC and they have had numerous outages in the past. Hetzner is known for terminating you for any sort of "DOS" like traffic, including high PPS. To add to that, those providers (except maybe OVH?) don't let you scale up and down with automated APIs.
- mattmanser 10y ago
  Reliability wise, do you actually use these services, as in my experience that's a complete myth. One of my clients on a dedicated server has never gone down. The site is blazingly fast, barely touches 5% CPU and pages have sub 50ms response times. Deploys take 10 seconds or so, I could make it faster but it's not really worth the cost/benefit. My client on Azure, with a significantly lower visitor count, pays 3-10 times as much, the site is sluggish, takes a long a time to spin up after deploys, hangs ocassionally, we've caught the whole site being offline a couple of times then it mysteriously starts working again with nothing in the logs, had a deploy to one site take down other sites and on top of that there's a 3-5ms delay between the database and website which causes all sorts of performance problems when a page makes too many DB requests. They've had to "scale up" to premium database in the past to handle loads I know a much cheaper dedicated server would have handled without even thinking about it. On top of that, Azure's management portal is super slow, regularly fails to execute commands and is incredibly frustrating to navigate and use. The claimed machine you get on cloud aren't anything like as performant as supposedly similar machines on dedicated. I'll admit I've generally found AWS to be significantly better than Azure, but still very expensive. And AWS went down a couple of weeks ago too.
  - gravypod 10y ago
    > on top of that there's a 3-5ms delay between the database and website which causes all sorts of performance problems Yea that's something I don't get too. With all of that IPC going over amazon's network for all of their services how much time are programs wasting sending and waiting for messages from other amazon services? I never really thought about that. If someone could measure this it would be interesting.

bluedino 10y ago

AWS is so much more than servers. If you just want a server to run some stuff on, you're right, it's faster and cheaper to buy a dedicated server from a reseller. With Amazon you have so many options when it comes to storage, compute power, load balancing... They have a huge portfolio of products and you can get everything in one location from one vendor.

zzzcpan 10y ago
"With Amazon you have so many options when it comes to storage, compute power, load balancing..." It used to be different, but today their most important offerings have open source equivalents. They are essentially off the shelf, because for your own projects there is no need to care about abuse or noisy neighbors. Most importantly, though, it's going to be cheaper and you still will be able to use cloud where it shines.
- zenlikethat 10y ago
  > It used to be different, but today their most important offerings have open source equivalents. Seriously? What about S3, RDS, VPC, IAM? The engineering $$$ (in time) to set up and maintain open source equivalents of these would not be cheap.
  - throwaway2048 10y ago
    AWS isnt cheap either
  - joelbondurant 10y ago
    S3 is shit compared to HDFS.

djchen 10y ago

Most of those providers you mentioned aren't as reliable and scalable as AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, etc. That isn't an apples to apples comparison. I would not want to host my business on So You Start, Kimsufi, Hetzner, and especially not Joe's Data Center. I have personally used Joes DC and they have had numerous outages in the past. Hetzner is known for terminating you for any sort of "DOS" like traffic, including high PPS. To add to that, those providers (except maybe OVH?) don't let you scale up and down with automated APIs.

mattmanser 10y ago
Reliability wise, do you actually use these services, as in my experience that's a complete myth. One of my clients on a dedicated server has never gone down. The site is blazingly fast, barely touches 5% CPU and pages have sub 50ms response times. Deploys take 10 seconds or so, I could make it faster but it's not really worth the cost/benefit. My client on Azure, with a significantly lower visitor count, pays 3-10 times as much, the site is sluggish, takes a long a time to spin up after deploys, hangs ocassionally, we've caught the whole site being offline a couple of times then it mysteriously starts working again with nothing in the logs, had a deploy to one site take down other sites and on top of that there's a 3-5ms delay between the database and website which causes all sorts of performance problems when a page makes too many DB requests. They've had to "scale up" to premium database in the past to handle loads I know a much cheaper dedicated server would have handled without even thinking about it. On top of that, Azure's management portal is super slow, regularly fails to execute commands and is incredibly frustrating to navigate and use. The claimed machine you get on cloud aren't anything like as performant as supposedly similar machines on dedicated. I'll admit I've generally found AWS to be significantly better than Azure, but still very expensive. And AWS went down a couple of weeks ago too.
- gravypod 10y ago
  > on top of that there's a 3-5ms delay between the database and website which causes all sorts of performance problems Yea that's something I don't get too. With all of that IPC going over amazon's network for all of their services how much time are programs wasting sending and waiting for messages from other amazon services? I never really thought about that. If someone could measure this it would be interesting.