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I've had a wonderful experience with hetzner. The web UI isn't as slick as AWS/GCP/Azure and bandwidth is slow, but the actual machines with great and they're

by asah 9y ago

I've had a wonderful experience with hetzner. The web UI isn't as slick as AWS/GCP/Azure and bandwidth is slow, but the actual machines with great and they're a fraction of the cost. For my workload, I got 20x (2000%) better price-performance than Google, which itself beat Amazon. Killer for R&D.

mschuster91 9y ago
> but the actual machines with great and they're a fraction of the cost. The advantage of cloud stuff is if you need an extremely high amount of power for an extremely short amount of time. For example, I needed a hundred CPU cores + TB of RAM for a 15-minute time span, paid less than 100$ - renting this or, god forbid, buying this, would have racked up 10k+ bills for sure, for buying probably over 200k. Once you have base-line load that can't be served with micro/mini instances, there is no financial alternative to renting, and in some cases buying+colo may come in even cheaper (but requires HW maintenance personnel). Snapchat, for example, pays 2 billion dollars for 5Y to Google, equivalent to 400M$ a year (per http://www.zdnet.com/article/snapchat-spending-2-billion-over-5-years-for-google-cloud/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/snapchat-spending-2-billion-ove...) ... I wonder what their CFO (or any board member who approved this) has smoked. No way this huge amount of spend is justified - not even the taxing differences between capex (buying) and opex (cloud/renting) can justify this in any way. In addition, all cloud providers charge heavily for data egress, which really makes me wonder how on earth a service like Netflix can actually be profitable.
- namibj 9y ago
  Netflix operates its own hardware in ISP networks and at internet exchanges to actually deliver the video. The only thing running in the cloud is all the database and UI backend, but no big video files.
- ihsw2 9y ago
  Netflix serves data from its OpenConnect rack-mounted servers, of which are deployed to every major ISP/IXP. Previously they were using mainstream CDNs but there were growing pains and cost concerns. To sum it up, everything outside of "the play button" is on AWS. This includes billing, account management, et al.

by asah 9y ago

mschuster91 9y ago

> but the actual machines with great and they're a fraction of the cost. The advantage of cloud stuff is if you need an extremely high amount of power for an extremely short amount of time. For example, I needed a hundred CPU cores + TB of RAM for a 15-minute time span, paid less than 100$ - renting this or, god forbid, buying this, would have racked up 10k+ bills for sure, for buying probably over 200k. Once you have base-line load that can't be served with micro/mini instances, there is no financial alternative to renting, and in some cases buying+colo may come in even cheaper (but requires HW maintenance personnel). Snapchat, for example, pays 2 billion dollars for 5Y to Google, equivalent to 400M$ a year (per http://www.zdnet.com/article/snapchat-spending-2-billion-over-5-years-for-google-cloud/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/snapchat-spending-2-billion-ove...) ... I wonder what their CFO (or any board member who approved this) has smoked. No way this huge amount of spend is justified - not even the taxing differences between capex (buying) and opex (cloud/renting) can justify this in any way. In addition, all cloud providers charge heavily for data egress, which really makes me wonder how on earth a service like Netflix can actually be profitable.

namibj 9y ago
Netflix operates its own hardware in ISP networks and at internet exchanges to actually deliver the video. The only thing running in the cloud is all the database and UI backend, but no big video files.
ihsw2 9y ago
Netflix serves data from its OpenConnect rack-mounted servers, of which are deployed to every major ISP/IXP. Previously they were using mainstream CDNs but there were growing pains and cost concerns. To sum it up, everything outside of "the play button" is on AWS. This includes billing, account management, et al.