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You're forgetting that engineers are expensive, and dedicated servers means spending more engineering time on things. Almost everyone considers hosting their ow

You're forgetting that engineers are expensive, and dedicated servers means spending more engineering time on things. Almost everyone considers hosting their own hardware, and it turns out that for most companies it's just not economical. I really doubt they switched to AWS because it's "cool". Also, isn't CDN bandwidth and data transfer going to be the lion's share of their costs? That's not a problem you can just throw dedicated servers at.

kick 7y ago
I'm not forgetting that at all: I don't see how a dedicated server takes any more time than AWS. AWS adds extra things you have to do and manage. Also, data transfer and bandwidth is far cheaper with dedicated and colos than AWS.
- anyfoo 7y ago
  Physical space, building and upgrading the servers, monitoring and replacing components of the servers and their vast storage arrays when they are broken, upgrading the hardware, making sure all the software is up to date with latest security patches, reaching either end of life of their version and having to perform major upgrades with potential compatibility problems, cable management, all this at remote locations... Vs. managing an Amazon account from a desk, any desk really, you don’t see the appeal?
  - latch 7y ago
    Imagine you're looking for a new place to live. You go to a realtor and he starts showing you McMansions and telling you how great they are. You say: "But those are really expensive, require a ton of maintenance, and hard to sell later on" Your agent looks at you and says: "Yes but do you really went to find land, get the permits, get it developed, deal with all those contractors and deal with the inevitable problems of a new constructions? A McMansion is obviously better." The agent has apparently never heard of apartments, condos, semi-detached and so on (yet somehow holds a very strong opinion). This is a problem; you find a new agent.
  - kick 7y ago
    I can manage a Hetzner from any desk in the world. Same for basically any other server. Even if that weren't true, it's really simple to do dedicated servers, even if you're not fielding through a company like Hetzner. See this, from the founder of StackOverflow: https://blog.codinghorror.com/building-servers-for-fun-and-prof-ok-maybe-just-for-fun/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/building-servers-for-fun-and-p... Dealing with security patches isn't anything you wouldn't already be doing with AWS, and is in some cases easier on dedicated hardware.
    - ctack 7y ago
      Someone from Hetzner sales team is going to be giving them a call soon. At least I hope so.
- danpalmer 7y ago
  My team runs a number of dedicated servers and a few cloud servers. AWS/GCP/the cloud do indeed add more things you need to be concerned with, but there are a lot of things you don't need to be concerned with. We've had to fix: crappy datacenter networking, BMC issues left in place by the datacenter, hard drives spewing SMART errors, USB devices being plugged into our servers, bad RAM. Our datacenter company _moved_ at one point and we had a few hours of downtime as a server was driven to the new site. Each of these isn't too bad, but when hardware issues or any kind of flakiness happens in "the cloud", it's so much easier to just bin the server and boot a new one – GCP will even live-migrate your VM as necessary to do this. That makes it so much more flexible. You can achieve this on dedicated servers, but not without a well resourced infrastructure team, which we (and many other companies of our size) do not have. We don't believe we're going to save money moving to the cloud, we think it's going to cost more in fact, but we also believe we'll speed up quite significantly as a result of the move.

kick 7y ago

I'm not forgetting that at all: I don't see how a dedicated server takes any more time than AWS. AWS adds extra things you have to do and manage. Also, data transfer and bandwidth is far cheaper with dedicated and colos than AWS.

anyfoo 7y ago
Physical space, building and upgrading the servers, monitoring and replacing components of the servers and their vast storage arrays when they are broken, upgrading the hardware, making sure all the software is up to date with latest security patches, reaching either end of life of their version and having to perform major upgrades with potential compatibility problems, cable management, all this at remote locations... Vs. managing an Amazon account from a desk, any desk really, you don’t see the appeal?
- latch 7y ago
  Imagine you're looking for a new place to live. You go to a realtor and he starts showing you McMansions and telling you how great they are. You say: "But those are really expensive, require a ton of maintenance, and hard to sell later on" Your agent looks at you and says: "Yes but do you really went to find land, get the permits, get it developed, deal with all those contractors and deal with the inevitable problems of a new constructions? A McMansion is obviously better." The agent has apparently never heard of apartments, condos, semi-detached and so on (yet somehow holds a very strong opinion). This is a problem; you find a new agent.
- kick 7y ago
  I can manage a Hetzner from any desk in the world. Same for basically any other server. Even if that weren't true, it's really simple to do dedicated servers, even if you're not fielding through a company like Hetzner. See this, from the founder of StackOverflow: https://blog.codinghorror.com/building-servers-for-fun-and-prof-ok-maybe-just-for-fun/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/building-servers-for-fun-and-p... Dealing with security patches isn't anything you wouldn't already be doing with AWS, and is in some cases easier on dedicated hardware.
  - ctack 7y ago
    Someone from Hetzner sales team is going to be giving them a call soon. At least I hope so.
danpalmer 7y ago
My team runs a number of dedicated servers and a few cloud servers. AWS/GCP/the cloud do indeed add more things you need to be concerned with, but there are a lot of things you don't need to be concerned with. We've had to fix: crappy datacenter networking, BMC issues left in place by the datacenter, hard drives spewing SMART errors, USB devices being plugged into our servers, bad RAM. Our datacenter company _moved_ at one point and we had a few hours of downtime as a server was driven to the new site. Each of these isn't too bad, but when hardware issues or any kind of flakiness happens in "the cloud", it's so much easier to just bin the server and boot a new one – GCP will even live-migrate your VM as necessary to do this. That makes it so much more flexible. You can achieve this on dedicated servers, but not without a well resourced infrastructure team, which we (and many other companies of our size) do not have. We don't believe we're going to save money moving to the cloud, we think it's going to cost more in fact, but we also believe we'll speed up quite significantly as a result of the move.