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I've used various hosts over the last 15 years in the UK and I honestly can't remember any downtime from anyone else. I do remember lots of AWS + Azure downtime

I've used various hosts over the last 15 years in the UK and I honestly can't remember any downtime from anyone else. I do remember lots of AWS + Azure downtime though. Remember Netflix going down? I'm not really sure where you're coming from. As someone who's been doing this for years, the old days when you had a £10 virtual machine that could handle tens of concurrent requests don't seem to be handled by the low price AWS/Azure servers. Let's not forget, tens of concurrent requests is 100,000s of monthly users, a major win for most startups. And even the expensive cloud options are utterly rubbish compared to what you can get for a bare metal, I like to compare the two as you can get a Ferrari for £1000 a year, or you can get a bicycle for £1000 but don't worry, it's a "cloud" bicycle so definitely go with that. I am constantly having problems with an Azure app at the moment timing out because of some poorly optimized queries that are being throttled because they somehow exceed the ever mysterious DTU. On my laptop, a 5 year old laptop, the queries take 10ms. So it's is impossible to run on Azure because "reasons" unless I pay a ridiculous amount of money to upgrade the SQL server. Yes, I could fix the query, but why should I be spending time on that? They're part of the admin system and are simple reports. Another app I worked on we ended up having to pay £1000 a year just so we could have multiple-domains + SSL, when we expecting to pay £80 p/y. Personally, every time I use cloud servers I regret it. I keep trying or clients really want it, and can understand the lower devops cost and that with bare metal, every 5-10 years I need to migrate the app to get a better server, but I honestly find the cloud servers so completely underpowered for the cost. I don't understand how they've got so popular. Basic devops for most startups is a day or two task once every few years. Write a deploy script, backup script once, and almost forget about it. (I absolutely love s3 though for backups though)

dgemm 7y ago
If you can run your app on a £10 VPS then you are not the target market for the big clouds. That's why it doesn't make sense for you. Larger users have very different priorities.
- mattmanser 7y ago
  This really isn't true. People use them for everything. Tiny little enterprise apps with 10s of users. Startups with mere 1,000s of uniques per month. Side projects. Everything. If you look at Microsoft's strategy with C#/Azure you'll see that every single tutorial uses deploying on Azure. Their instructions for how to deploy to a real server in their tutorial is pretty much "we're not telling you, figure it out yourself, sucker". Their new business strategy is to get the entire of their userbase paying massively over the odds for hosting small apps. And, in reality, almost every app by any startup you could go and look at on producthunt (and probably most of ycombinator startups) have such low volumes of usage they could run on a $5 VPS. But I bet all of them are on AWS (there's even a few comments on this thread that basically say "start on AWS, then move"). Everyone is using cloud now, go to any meetup and ask. Or simply look at the sales figures.
  - ClumsyPilot 7y ago
    Honestly if you are deploying an application to production, hopefully you have a level of knowledge beyond "click here, then click here'. The other side of this is that documentation is hard, and Microsoft documentation is frequently lacking or out of date, especially for anything off the beaten path. I use IoT Hub for messaging, and it's documentation is scant, many limitations and failure modes are found by trial and error.
    - mattmanser 7y ago
      I don't understand where you would get this info from then? Tutorials provided by the framework makers themselves are pretty standard. Magically absorb the knowledge in an incantation to the Redmond Gods in the ether?
      - ClumsyPilot 7y ago
        haha, sometimes it feels that way, for their less-popular commercial services documentation is lacking and you can't even read the source! On reflection my comment about level of skill is unfair, what I should have said is: generally the information is there, but it's not always in the form of follow-able 'How-to' guides, often it's a dry detailed documentation. If you need something other than the standard setup, it is up to you to know what you are looking for and put 2 and 2 together. Of course it is by no means easy. They do have reasonable guidance on how to deploy ASP.net core on Linux, but it can be lacking for lesser used stuff
ClumsyPilot 7y ago
I have recently started a project of deploying kubernetes cluster at home and hosting some personal projects there. My top findings are: 1) bare metal is dramatically faster than most cloud instances. Many of us might have collection of old hardware that, by performance, would be equivalent to >$1,000 in monthly cloud fees. 2) If from the start of your career you have only dealt with modern cloud/Azure/AWS, there is a whole body of knowledge you are missing. Acquiring it from scratch is time consuming, and you are never quite sure you are doing the right thing. As a developer, I don't pay the AWS bill, so it would be more rational to spend my time on learning ML or something else that will be reflected in my paycheck.
- gtycomb 7y ago
  > started a project of deploying kubernetes cluster at home and hosting I am also thinking along these lines but not sure about reasonable paths to try. Care to share some pointers on your setup? Basically looking to serve web pages from a server cluster at home.
- sdan 7y ago
  So how do you do routing? I have an old Linux machine that I haven’t been using and don’t know how I can securely and efficient route that into the internet (don’t want to use my ip for connecting to Redis for example) which is why I as thinking of using some vpn hosted on gcp. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Can’t handle the monthly payments to gcp only to get a raspberry pi level of compute.
  - whiteandnerdy 7y ago
    I host a Plex instance on a server on my home network, and struggled with setting up external access because my ISP at the time had a double NAT. What I ended up doing was renting a super cheap VPS from TINYKVM (https://tinykvm.com/ https://tinykvm.com/) which I pay $15 a year for. I point my DNS at the VPS, then I use the Zerotier VPN to tunnel traffic to my home server (Zerotier is embarrassingly easy to set up - I struggled for a while with OpenVPN but gave up). I use iptables packet forwarding to route traffic on port 443 or 80 from the VPS over the VPN to my local server, which is running an Nginx instance to serve the traffic. This works perfectly for me 99% of the time. Main pain points have been the unreliability of hosting a server locally where Internet can die and power drop off, and a small amount of sysadmining on the VPS, which is so tiny that I have to be mindful of disk space (e.g. removing old Linux upgrade images every so often, etc). All told though, it works surprisingly seamlessly, and there's a certain smugness to knowing traffic from my smart TV goes all the way round the world and back through a VPN just to talk to my server sitting one foot below the TV.

dgemm 7y ago

If you can run your app on a £10 VPS then you are not the target market for the big clouds. That's why it doesn't make sense for you. Larger users have very different priorities.

mattmanser 7y ago
This really isn't true. People use them for everything. Tiny little enterprise apps with 10s of users. Startups with mere 1,000s of uniques per month. Side projects. Everything. If you look at Microsoft's strategy with C#/Azure you'll see that every single tutorial uses deploying on Azure. Their instructions for how to deploy to a real server in their tutorial is pretty much "we're not telling you, figure it out yourself, sucker". Their new business strategy is to get the entire of their userbase paying massively over the odds for hosting small apps. And, in reality, almost every app by any startup you could go and look at on producthunt (and probably most of ycombinator startups) have such low volumes of usage they could run on a $5 VPS. But I bet all of them are on AWS (there's even a few comments on this thread that basically say "start on AWS, then move"). Everyone is using cloud now, go to any meetup and ask. Or simply look at the sales figures.
- ClumsyPilot 7y ago
  Honestly if you are deploying an application to production, hopefully you have a level of knowledge beyond "click here, then click here'. The other side of this is that documentation is hard, and Microsoft documentation is frequently lacking or out of date, especially for anything off the beaten path. I use IoT Hub for messaging, and it's documentation is scant, many limitations and failure modes are found by trial and error.
  - mattmanser 7y ago
    I don't understand where you would get this info from then? Tutorials provided by the framework makers themselves are pretty standard. Magically absorb the knowledge in an incantation to the Redmond Gods in the ether?
    - ClumsyPilot 7y ago
      haha, sometimes it feels that way, for their less-popular commercial services documentation is lacking and you can't even read the source! On reflection my comment about level of skill is unfair, what I should have said is: generally the information is there, but it's not always in the form of follow-able 'How-to' guides, often it's a dry detailed documentation. If you need something other than the standard setup, it is up to you to know what you are looking for and put 2 and 2 together. Of course it is by no means easy. They do have reasonable guidance on how to deploy ASP.net core on Linux, but it can be lacking for lesser used stuff

ClumsyPilot 7y ago

I have recently started a project of deploying kubernetes cluster at home and hosting some personal projects there. My top findings are: 1) bare metal is dramatically faster than most cloud instances. Many of us might have collection of old hardware that, by performance, would be equivalent to >$1,000 in monthly cloud fees. 2) If from the start of your career you have only dealt with modern cloud/Azure/AWS, there is a whole body of knowledge you are missing. Acquiring it from scratch is time consuming, and you are never quite sure you are doing the right thing. As a developer, I don't pay the AWS bill, so it would be more rational to spend my time on learning ML or something else that will be reflected in my paycheck.

gtycomb 7y ago
> started a project of deploying kubernetes cluster at home and hosting I am also thinking along these lines but not sure about reasonable paths to try. Care to share some pointers on your setup? Basically looking to serve web pages from a server cluster at home.
sdan 7y ago
So how do you do routing? I have an old Linux machine that I haven’t been using and don’t know how I can securely and efficient route that into the internet (don’t want to use my ip for connecting to Redis for example) which is why I as thinking of using some vpn hosted on gcp. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Can’t handle the monthly payments to gcp only to get a raspberry pi level of compute.
- whiteandnerdy 7y ago
  I host a Plex instance on a server on my home network, and struggled with setting up external access because my ISP at the time had a double NAT. What I ended up doing was renting a super cheap VPS from TINYKVM (https://tinykvm.com/ https://tinykvm.com/) which I pay $15 a year for. I point my DNS at the VPS, then I use the Zerotier VPN to tunnel traffic to my home server (Zerotier is embarrassingly easy to set up - I struggled for a while with OpenVPN but gave up). I use iptables packet forwarding to route traffic on port 443 or 80 from the VPS over the VPN to my local server, which is running an Nginx instance to serve the traffic. This works perfectly for me 99% of the time. Main pain points have been the unreliability of hosting a server locally where Internet can die and power drop off, and a small amount of sysadmining on the VPS, which is so tiny that I have to be mindful of disk space (e.g. removing old Linux upgrade images every so often, etc). All told though, it works surprisingly seamlessly, and there's a certain smugness to knowing traffic from my smart TV goes all the way round the world and back through a VPN just to talk to my server sitting one foot below the TV.