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Impressive. On a semi-related note, the fact that cloud providers offer managed Postgres databases is great, but things like this keep pushing me to think abou

Impressive. On a semi-related note, the fact that cloud providers offer managed Postgres databases is great, but things like this keep pushing me to think about bare metal in colo. A $20,000 server/backup combo with a couple of these will give me 5x the performance of a server that costs me $70k/year on AWS before provisioned IOPS. That's a huge gap to play with for taking care of your own maintenance costs.

dboreham 10y ago
It has always been the case that owned metal is much cheaper than cloud. Cloud wins for things like very small machines (you can't buy 20% of a metal box); temporary deployments; and startups where the investors don't want to be on the hook for big $$ capex that they end up needing to shift on eBay post flame-out. Also where you just don't have the ability to run hardware (increasingly the case) and where for whatever reason the cost to deploy and run metal would add up to more than your $70k delta (easy if it needs one more person on staff). Also remember that funky storage card may have a firmware bug that costs you hundreds of hours to track down and get resolved. That time could have been burned by Jeff Bezos' guys instead..
- Toast_ 10y ago
  >where you just don't have the ability to run hardware (increasingly the case) Softlayer has 'on demand' bare metal plans. I'm not sure how cost effective it would be compared compared to running your own box, but the simplicity is nice and they had me up and running in under 2 hours (assembled with customizations). http://www.softlayer.com/bare-metal-servers http://www.softlayer.com/bare-metal-servers
  - utternerd 10y ago
    As a customer, I can tell you we're very, very happy (Singapore SoftLayer, our Asian DC). No upfront capex, I can add or subtract hardware as necessary (I can say the same, they usually take about 2 hours to have it up and configured as requested), and my favorite benefit is when new hardware is available, we just spin up new servers and retire the old ones; bill ends up being the ~same. It runs substantially cheaper than our colo here in Irvine, but that's also not apples-to-apples. That said, I don't plan on continuing with colos unless there's a pressing reason, after almost 15 years of them being my default. Bare Metal is the sweet spot in my eyes, the benefits of cloud without the downside of shared/inconsistent resources.
  - toast0 10y ago
    How custom can you get with the hourly machines? The order page (without logging in) looks like you have to pick a ram size (and they don't go beyond 256GB), and you can only go up to 4 disks. That said, I know the order page for monthly has maximum ram sizes listed below some of the monthly machines I manage, so maybe the hourly page is a simplified version of the truth too.
    - Toast_ 10y ago
      I'm not really sure about hourly plans. When I was configuring my machine (~1-2 years ago) I was able to select hourly or monthly billing (hourly would've been outrageously expensive).
- chx 10y ago
  I never understood this. Just rent a dedicated box or ten. There's no capex, it's way cheaper to have 3-5 times the capability you will need just sitting there instead of renting stuff from Amazon with all the I/O unpredictability, complexity, w/e. People talk as if colo and cloud is the only solution -- and I am like, rent dedicated is the only solution. I do not readily know how huge your site needs to be for colo to worth it but Examiner was ~75th on Quantcast and we ran it on a dozen dedicated boxes and colo would'v been ridiculously more expensive.
  - cookiecaper 10y ago
    Renting a dedicated box doesn't have that cool "we can scale INFINITELY!" vibe. ;)
    - chx 10y ago
      YAGNI.
      - problems 10y ago
        Exactly. The only time the cloud services really pay off are when you need to scale up or down massive capacity overnight. The odds of that happening at most companies are very, very slim, even most of the web companies. If you're really concerned about that though, I'd say go for the cloud option - just make it so you can start small on a single physical server, but can scale onto the cloud, then migrate that to physical hardware as needed. With this set up, you save massive cash and avoid vendor lock-in.
        mrep 10y ago
        Or if you are a team like mine that develops/manages 200 servers, 15 RDS database instances, 500 TB of compressed S3 data, and provides accessibility to all of that through API's with only 5 developers because of how easy AWS makes it for us. While our server costs are probably higher than going bare metal, how many developers would it take you to manage all of that on bare metal hosts?
mozumder 10y ago
You don't even need to co-lo. Just build a system for your home on a static IP address with a business account from your ISP. It's so much cheaper than AWS, and you get unlimited bandwidth.
zxcmx 10y ago
Yep but the FTEs you need are 100k+ each, managing baremetal servers is almost certainly not your core business, and you're running the risk of gitlab style fat fingering dinking around with low level stuff that you did to save money.

dboreham 10y ago

It has always been the case that owned metal is much cheaper than cloud. Cloud wins for things like very small machines (you can't buy 20% of a metal box); temporary deployments; and startups where the investors don't want to be on the hook for big $$ capex that they end up needing to shift on eBay post flame-out. Also where you just don't have the ability to run hardware (increasingly the case) and where for whatever reason the cost to deploy and run metal would add up to more than your $70k delta (easy if it needs one more person on staff). Also remember that funky storage card may have a firmware bug that costs you hundreds of hours to track down and get resolved. That time could have been burned by Jeff Bezos' guys instead..

Toast_ 10y ago
>where you just don't have the ability to run hardware (increasingly the case) Softlayer has 'on demand' bare metal plans. I'm not sure how cost effective it would be compared compared to running your own box, but the simplicity is nice and they had me up and running in under 2 hours (assembled with customizations). http://www.softlayer.com/bare-metal-servers http://www.softlayer.com/bare-metal-servers
- utternerd 10y ago
  As a customer, I can tell you we're very, very happy (Singapore SoftLayer, our Asian DC). No upfront capex, I can add or subtract hardware as necessary (I can say the same, they usually take about 2 hours to have it up and configured as requested), and my favorite benefit is when new hardware is available, we just spin up new servers and retire the old ones; bill ends up being the ~same. It runs substantially cheaper than our colo here in Irvine, but that's also not apples-to-apples. That said, I don't plan on continuing with colos unless there's a pressing reason, after almost 15 years of them being my default. Bare Metal is the sweet spot in my eyes, the benefits of cloud without the downside of shared/inconsistent resources.
- toast0 10y ago
  How custom can you get with the hourly machines? The order page (without logging in) looks like you have to pick a ram size (and they don't go beyond 256GB), and you can only go up to 4 disks. That said, I know the order page for monthly has maximum ram sizes listed below some of the monthly machines I manage, so maybe the hourly page is a simplified version of the truth too.
  - Toast_ 10y ago
    I'm not really sure about hourly plans. When I was configuring my machine (~1-2 years ago) I was able to select hourly or monthly billing (hourly would've been outrageously expensive).
chx 10y ago
I never understood this. Just rent a dedicated box or ten. There's no capex, it's way cheaper to have 3-5 times the capability you will need just sitting there instead of renting stuff from Amazon with all the I/O unpredictability, complexity, w/e. People talk as if colo and cloud is the only solution -- and I am like, rent dedicated is the only solution. I do not readily know how huge your site needs to be for colo to worth it but Examiner was ~75th on Quantcast and we ran it on a dozen dedicated boxes and colo would'v been ridiculously more expensive.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  Renting a dedicated box doesn't have that cool "we can scale INFINITELY!" vibe. ;)
  - chx 10y ago
    YAGNI.
    - problems 10y ago
      Exactly. The only time the cloud services really pay off are when you need to scale up or down massive capacity overnight. The odds of that happening at most companies are very, very slim, even most of the web companies. If you're really concerned about that though, I'd say go for the cloud option - just make it so you can start small on a single physical server, but can scale onto the cloud, then migrate that to physical hardware as needed. With this set up, you save massive cash and avoid vendor lock-in.
      - mrep 10y ago
        Or if you are a team like mine that develops/manages 200 servers, 15 RDS database instances, 500 TB of compressed S3 data, and provides accessibility to all of that through API's with only 5 developers because of how easy AWS makes it for us. While our server costs are probably higher than going bare metal, how many developers would it take you to manage all of that on bare metal hosts?

mozumder 10y ago

You don't even need to co-lo. Just build a system for your home on a static IP address with a business account from your ISP. It's so much cheaper than AWS, and you get unlimited bandwidth.

zxcmx 10y ago

Yep but the FTEs you need are 100k+ each, managing baremetal servers is almost certainly not your core business, and you're running the risk of gitlab style fat fingering dinking around with low level stuff that you did to save money.