4 ms·

The part your missing is that basically all dedicated server hosters are this cheap. DO, Vultr, AWS, GCP, Azure are the odd ones out and extremely expensive.

The part your missing is that basically all dedicated server hosters are this cheap. DO, Vultr, AWS, GCP, Azure are the odd ones out and extremely expensive. The only reason ever not to use dedicated servers is if you're in the bay area and ops wages are so overinflated that you literally can't afford an ops or devops person. For everyone else on the planet, the comparison between the wage of an ops person, and server costs, is always in favor of dedicated hardware with your own ops people.

sokoloff 6y ago
Any employee comes with overhead costs ($$ and time and risk). Lots of side projects get off the ground only because people don’t have to cover the fixed quantum of costs that hiring an employee brings. “If this doesn’t take off, I’m on the hook for ~$100/month when it could have been under $10/month“ just isn’t that compelling.
- marcosdumay 6y ago
  Ops has a low baseline complexity, and scales more or less linearly with usage on low usage scenarios. It's something worth optimizing, but the idea that it will break a starting initiative isn't realistic.
jwr 6y ago
The thing I don't understand is why would people consider AWS to have lower "ops" costs? I can deploy my SaaS either to VPS servers (AWS, DigitalOcean, Azure, etc) or to physical servers. Both deployments use the same ansible automation. The only difference is that I additionally use terraform to set up the cloud instances. In every case, if a machine fails it is my problem. Where is the savings on ops/devops?
- kuschku 6y ago
  > Where is the savings on ops/devops? I don't know either, I've always used european dedicated hosters. But apparently the typical YC user needs to pay 300'000$/year for a dedicated ops person just to run an ansible script?
- kuschku 6y ago
  Hilariously, this whole thing is again showing up as issue on the frontpage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23798347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23798347

sokoloff 6y ago

Any employee comes with overhead costs ($$ and time and risk). Lots of side projects get off the ground only because people don’t have to cover the fixed quantum of costs that hiring an employee brings. “If this doesn’t take off, I’m on the hook for ~$100/month when it could have been under $10/month“ just isn’t that compelling.

marcosdumay 6y ago
Ops has a low baseline complexity, and scales more or less linearly with usage on low usage scenarios. It's something worth optimizing, but the idea that it will break a starting initiative isn't realistic.

jwr 6y ago

The thing I don't understand is why would people consider AWS to have lower "ops" costs? I can deploy my SaaS either to VPS servers (AWS, DigitalOcean, Azure, etc) or to physical servers. Both deployments use the same ansible automation. The only difference is that I additionally use terraform to set up the cloud instances. In every case, if a machine fails it is my problem. Where is the savings on ops/devops?

kuschku 6y ago
> Where is the savings on ops/devops? I don't know either, I've always used european dedicated hosters. But apparently the typical YC user needs to pay 300'000$/year for a dedicated ops person just to run an ansible script?
kuschku 6y ago
Hilariously, this whole thing is again showing up as issue on the frontpage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23798347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23798347