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I think there might be an advantage to either being older or perhaps being more experienced, I'm not sure which. I find people my age automatically go for rent

I think there might be an advantage to either being older or perhaps being more experienced, I'm not sure which. I find people my age automatically go for renting equipment vs the cloud. I've never understood the advantages of these services except for when you have drastic usage changes throughout the day. But all the younger folks seem to think it's awesome: "Look ma, I didn't even need to register my own domain, wait for DNS propagation, or install software, or wait a few days for hardware to be provisioned. That cut my MVP time from 30 days to 25 days!" For about $250/m I can get a dedicated windows server that can handle just about anything a startup can throw at it. Sure it's work, but not too much work. Hardware matters. I would estimate the cost of running in the cloud to be 3-4x more expensive than rented hardware. The $60/m VPS you're getting with a virtual core is usually one hyperthread on one actual core. That's a lot of money for so little and hourly billing doesn't help if you're using it 24/7. The proprietary SAAS situation is even worse than VPSs. Besides the lock in, the billing is so abstracted from reality that you'll never realize how much you're overpaying.

maxxxxx 9y ago
If you are, like me, not experienced with running servers I can see how going cloud helps getting started. I would have trouble setting up my own servers with backup, software and security. But it's probably good to start learning about these things so you can think about running your own servers.
- H1Supreme 9y ago
  If you're building web apps, you should learn about web servers. I realize that's an obvious statement, but a little can go a long way if you have no experience.
brianwawok 9y ago
Except the young ones that know how to use the tech, can go: Hey this portion of my load is HIGHLY flexible. I can use a very simple celery queue to scale this out to 1000 preemptible instances, and pay literally peanuts to harness the power of 1000 computers for the 30 minutes I need it, then shut it down for the other 23.5 hours a day. There are a wide range of ways to do things. From Heroku to Bare Metal to EC2 to Lambda to managed services (like Firebase). I think they all can be a win in the right case. If you are always using the same solution (in your case, maybe rented window servers?), I would heavily question if you are using the right tech. And personally as soon as I hear people running Windows to run actual code that does work, I shudder a bit.
- IanDrake 9y ago
  I think I exempted the exact scenario you mentioned. Windows, like Linux, is a great OS, IF you know what you're doing and a terrible OS IF you don't. My point is, hardware matters and abstracting it has real cost in terms of control, performance, and dollars as the OP has now learned.
  - brianwawok 9y ago
    Depends. You can use docker on top of say a container-OS and not need to know anything linux (and in fact you can't even do anything linux, it is all locked down and readonly). Of course hardware matters. Of course it is embarrassing to have your entire business model crushed by how you built your product. It happens in many ways.

maxxxxx 9y ago

If you are, like me, not experienced with running servers I can see how going cloud helps getting started. I would have trouble setting up my own servers with backup, software and security. But it's probably good to start learning about these things so you can think about running your own servers.

H1Supreme 9y ago
If you're building web apps, you should learn about web servers. I realize that's an obvious statement, but a little can go a long way if you have no experience.

brianwawok 9y ago

Except the young ones that know how to use the tech, can go: Hey this portion of my load is HIGHLY flexible. I can use a very simple celery queue to scale this out to 1000 preemptible instances, and pay literally peanuts to harness the power of 1000 computers for the 30 minutes I need it, then shut it down for the other 23.5 hours a day. There are a wide range of ways to do things. From Heroku to Bare Metal to EC2 to Lambda to managed services (like Firebase). I think they all can be a win in the right case. If you are always using the same solution (in your case, maybe rented window servers?), I would heavily question if you are using the right tech. And personally as soon as I hear people running Windows to run actual code that does work, I shudder a bit.

IanDrake 9y ago
I think I exempted the exact scenario you mentioned. Windows, like Linux, is a great OS, IF you know what you're doing and a terrible OS IF you don't. My point is, hardware matters and abstracting it has real cost in terms of control, performance, and dollars as the OP has now learned.
- brianwawok 9y ago
  Depends. You can use docker on top of say a container-OS and not need to know anything linux (and in fact you can't even do anything linux, it is all locked down and readonly). Of course hardware matters. Of course it is embarrassing to have your entire business model crushed by how you built your product. It happens in many ways.