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> Physical co-lo is only cheaper if your time is worthless Physical colocation is nearly always cheaper than AWS for most use cases. Exceptions are when your

by jjav 5y ago

> Physical co-lo is only cheaper if your time is worthless Physical colocation is nearly always cheaper than AWS for most use cases. Exceptions are when your usage is so tiny that it doesn't need even a single full-time server, and, when your usage is so erratic that provisioning for the spikes doesn't make sense. For everyone else, you're paying a very large premium for AWS over what it'd cost to buy and operate some servers.

sofixa 5y ago
Or when you need anything more than to run a few very basic services ( like a PHP app with apache and mysql). AWS have managed services for a lot of different things, which save a lot of time on maintenance. Object storage? Message queue? Any type of database? ML? etc. etc. etc. And of course, there's the scalability. With on-prem it's a careful balancing act of buying enough capacity to have space to expand but not too much to waste it, and you have to regularly keep an eye out lest you hit a limit with multi-week lead times ( e.g. you're out of storage, and buying a new shelf can take weeks to be usable).
- nix23 5y ago
  Look, i never said aws good/bad, i just said do the math and don't trow your money blindly at some IaaS/PaaS/SaaS etc.
  - pythonaut_16 5y ago
    That's really the only answer. Do the research and the math for your own business/use and see if AWS is a better value than colo or your own hardware.
iso1210 5y ago
Oh certainly if you want some beefy server with graphics cards, tons of memory etc, running 24/7, it's probably cheaper to co-locate. A g3s.xlarge costs $13k for 3 years with amazon, I suspect kitting your own server out and hiring 1U of space and a 1G internet access port would be much cheaper over the 3 year contract and not run into nasty bandwidth surprises. The benefit of AWS-style comes in at 1) Flexibile workflows (I need the grunt on mondays, but not the rest of the week) 2) Tiny workflows (I just want a couple of $5/month VMs in different cities and some DNS to host a couple of toys) Now if you have the $8/hour self drive, that's great if you use it once a year on a 10 hour trip to a holiday destination. It's awful if you use it for 2 hours a day.
ForHackernews 5y ago
Again, you're completely discounting the ops time involved in "operate some servers" - how many devops/SRE folks do you need to employ to do that? And 24/7 on-call?
- jjav 5y ago
  I need the exact same devops team I have today. No big difference to them where the boxes sit and who owns them. It's the CFO who sees the bigger difference. I do save the few staff hours needed on physical maintenance of racking, cabling and replacing hardware. But at typical startup scale that's not much work. In the past I've done it myself on the side. As the company gets larger it takes dedicated staff, but at that point the comparable AWS bill is so large I could pay their full year salary on a single month of AWS bills.

by jjav 5y ago

sofixa 5y ago

Or when you need anything more than to run a few very basic services ( like a PHP app with apache and mysql). AWS have managed services for a lot of different things, which save a lot of time on maintenance. Object storage? Message queue? Any type of database? ML? etc. etc. etc. And of course, there's the scalability. With on-prem it's a careful balancing act of buying enough capacity to have space to expand but not too much to waste it, and you have to regularly keep an eye out lest you hit a limit with multi-week lead times ( e.g. you're out of storage, and buying a new shelf can take weeks to be usable).

nix23 5y ago
Look, i never said aws good/bad, i just said do the math and don't trow your money blindly at some IaaS/PaaS/SaaS etc.
- pythonaut_16 5y ago
  That's really the only answer. Do the research and the math for your own business/use and see if AWS is a better value than colo or your own hardware.

iso1210 5y ago

Oh certainly if you want some beefy server with graphics cards, tons of memory etc, running 24/7, it's probably cheaper to co-locate. A g3s.xlarge costs $13k for 3 years with amazon, I suspect kitting your own server out and hiring 1U of space and a 1G internet access port would be much cheaper over the 3 year contract and not run into nasty bandwidth surprises. The benefit of AWS-style comes in at 1) Flexibile workflows (I need the grunt on mondays, but not the rest of the week) 2) Tiny workflows (I just want a couple of $5/month VMs in different cities and some DNS to host a couple of toys) Now if you have the $8/hour self drive, that's great if you use it once a year on a 10 hour trip to a holiday destination. It's awful if you use it for 2 hours a day.

ForHackernews 5y ago

Again, you're completely discounting the ops time involved in "operate some servers" - how many devops/SRE folks do you need to employ to do that? And 24/7 on-call?

jjav 5y ago
I need the exact same devops team I have today. No big difference to them where the boxes sit and who owns them. It's the CFO who sees the bigger difference. I do save the few staff hours needed on physical maintenance of racking, cabling and replacing hardware. But at typical startup scale that's not much work. In the past I've done it myself on the side. As the company gets larger it takes dedicated staff, but at that point the comparable AWS bill is so large I could pay their full year salary on a single month of AWS bills.