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I've got some clients on dedicated servers and some on cloud, the performance differences are staggering. Cloud seems so bad. For what you pay for in cloud it r

I've got some clients on dedicated servers and some on cloud, the performance differences are staggering. Cloud seems so bad. For what you pay for in cloud it really feels like you get 10x the performance for the same price in dedicated hosting. This really underlines it. Running one of the most popular sites on the web with just 9 web servers, 2 SQL servers and a smattering of dedicated role servers. But that popularity ultimately boils down to 450 req/s, and they've got a nice, fast site. No faffing around with "scaling" up and down to handle the fact the cloud servers are slow. It always feels you get nowhere near the listed performance and are constantly getting throttled. I would guess a lot of startups would be better off paying a few grand a year for a couple of dedicated servers and just forgetting about AWS/Google Cloud/Azure.

BrentOzar 7y ago
> But that popularity ultimately boils down to 450 req/s Way higher than that. Was 2X higher back in 2016, even: https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-architecture-2016-edition/ https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-ar...
inapis 7y ago
While true in a lot of cases, the answer is still not a binary yes or no. AWS/Azure/GCP still add a lot of quality of life improvements to workflows. Performance is not the only metric to compare on. There’s also productivity, time and opportunity costs. There are real benefits in outsourcing or buying off the shelf. Second, it also depends on wether you are write or read heavy. SO is primarily read heavy and they can get away with most requests never hitting their main servers but instead being handled by a CDN. But overall I do agree. Dedicated would give you a performance boost compared to virtual machines. And sometimes it might be worth it to bring stuff in house and do it yourself.

BrentOzar 7y ago

> But that popularity ultimately boils down to 450 req/s Way higher than that. Was 2X higher back in 2016, even: https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-architecture-2016-edition/ https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-ar...

inapis 7y ago

While true in a lot of cases, the answer is still not a binary yes or no. AWS/Azure/GCP still add a lot of quality of life improvements to workflows. Performance is not the only metric to compare on. There’s also productivity, time and opportunity costs. There are real benefits in outsourcing or buying off the shelf. Second, it also depends on wether you are write or read heavy. SO is primarily read heavy and they can get away with most requests never hitting their main servers but instead being handled by a CDN. But overall I do agree. Dedicated would give you a performance boost compared to virtual machines. And sometimes it might be worth it to bring stuff in house and do it yourself.