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I take pretty unhealthy pleasure in looking at EC2/GC announcements and comparing them to random offers on the WebHostingTalk's Dedicated Hosting Offers section
by latch 5y ago
I take pretty unhealthy pleasure in looking at EC2/GC announcements and comparing them to random offers on the WebHostingTalk's Dedicated Hosting Offers section. The cloud offerings almost always end up being 2-4x more expensive (or more) and 2-4x slower.
Except when GPUs are involved. This just seems like something that dedicated hosting industry isn't on top of _at all_. I don't know if it's hardware availability, upfront costs, unreliable demand, an inability to compete on price, or if the usage really is so much more elastic.
The best I could [quickly] find was a 5600X w/32G Ram, 1TB SSD and 12GB 3060 for $189/m.
- rjzzleep 5y agoApparently Hetzner discontinued theirs because of cryptocurrency abuse(whatever that means)
- jiggawatts 5y agoThere was a related discussion here on YC News. The gist of it was that these hosting providers exchange credit for cash-equivalents. For example, you can sign up with a credit card, and then immediately start using the compute that you have purchased to mine crypto. Now, if you pay your bill, this ought not to matter. Who cares what you use your rented computer power for? (As long at is not hideously illegal child porn hosting or what have you.) The problem was that the smaller providers were being mercilessly abused by criminals signing up with stolen credit card numbers. They would extract sufficient crypto coins before the provider shut them down for this to be worth doing over and over. The providers could have simply requested up-front payment for compute until a "track record" was established, and this would have solved the problem. Instead, they all opted to maximise the "sign ups per month" metric to get those sweet, sweet KPIs met, and then killed the crypto-mining accounts mercilessly with AI detection. ... which also killed several legitimate customer's businesses outright. Typically with no recourse. Oops.
- krasin 5y agoSpecifically Hetzner required me to put a deposit, when I rented a server a few months ago. It was a reasonable amount, and you're right about the reasons. Edit. Found their message: "At the following link you can upload the copy of your ID, or you can use our pre-paid option, where you pay €20 in advance via PayPal: https://accounts.hetzner.com https://accounts.hetzner.com"
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- toomuchtodo 5y agoYou’re not paying for the compute, you’re paying for IAM, the service ecosystem, unified enterprise billing, and the engineering experience. Totally different market than bare metal colocated. Like comparing a crated LS engine to a showroom Corvette.
- dannyw 5y agoYeah, but for compute or bandwidth intense businesses, you might not need IAM, unified enterprise billing, or the "engineering experience". I helped a niche API-as-a-service company go from -20% margins to being profitable. How? Moving away from AWS to Hetzner.
- whatever1 5y agoAdministration is not free. Given today’s risks I really doubt a small scale company can afford in-house properly secured hosting/storing of anything valuable. Yes your monthly bill is lower, but now the liability is all yours.
- latch 5y agoThese types of comments constantly come up. It's a false dichotomy. Following HN guidelines, I'll assume best intention rather than trolling or FUD. There are other options than the two that you've described - namely VPS providers and dedicated providers. Can you help me understand why you thought those were the only two options? Maybe people who joined the industry after, say ~2010, were primarily exposed only to AWS?
- judge2020 5y agoI don’t think anyone is saying that VPS and dedicated server providers aren’t an option. Rather, most startups rule them out since, if you grow enough to where the administration control of the Cloud is warranted, that past decision now warrants a host migration and the month+ of planning that goes into that. Unless the company really started as a side-project whose main funding was extra cash from the founder, it doesn’t make sense to artificially limit your growth. Once more, it’s not like AWS is absolutely nothing. Chances are that any web-based startup would indeed be able to take advantage of the many autoscale-as-a-service features of AWS, enabling them to handle the next quarterly 100x increase in customers and throughout.
- totoglazer 5y agoI think this really is much more elastic for some workloads. I want to use hundreds of A100s for a few weeks. Then not use them for a quarter while I use and analyze what I trained, fine tune on smaller machines, etc. We’d never be able to justify buying a cluster that large and managing it for intermittent use, much better to have it burst properly.
- ev1 5y agoIIRC, you are not allowed to use a RTX/GTX in a datacentre.
- cbg0 5y agoSays who, Nvidia? They might not honor the warranty, but there's nothing they can do to stop you.
- NikolaeVarius 5y agoLicenses are a thing?
- short12 5y agoI bought a card not a license
- karmasimida 5y agoEULA says it If you are at AWS scale, NVIDIA would definitely sue you ...
- slownews45 5y agoif you like following WHT dedicated hosting offers one fun thing is to just see how long lasting (or not) these providers are. Despite supposedly being 4x faster and 4x cheaper, these dedicated hosting offer guys come and go like moths circling a burning flame. Same thing with the s3 competitor file hosting companies. I haven't followed this space recently from hotfile / filesonic etc etc. All supposedly way cheaper than S3 - but boy do they disappear in the night at times.
- latch 5y agoOn the flip side, there's no shortage of providers that have been around since before AWS was a thing. For example, the quote that I found was from a provider I used over a decade ago (no affiliation), and who have been in business since 1999.
- slownews45 5y agoI just checked my old provider pair networks. Processor 8 Cores HD 240GB SSD RAM 16GB $311 / month This is not that competitive with m5a.4xlarge reserved for one year. 64GB / 16 core machines - good modern gen cores
- reitzensteinm 5y agoThose are managed dedicated servers, where they'll install and maintain software for you. It's an entirely separate class. And even if it wasn't, the existence of a single expensive dedicated server provider wouldn't disprove parent's claims.
- fxtentacle 5y agoWhen I needed GPU instances, I asked my long-term bare metal hoster (hetzner.de) and they sent me a private price list. My theory is that publicly advertising GPU instances tends to attract people who want to convert stolen credit cards into crypto mining power. I mean it's the same reason why the 3090 == GPU most suitable for crypto has been sold out for a year. That's also in line with the fact that I had to sign a voucher stating that I will NOT do any kind of crypto hosting / mining / processing on any of their servers before I got that GPU instance.
- iamcreasy 5y agoAre the prices at the private price list considerably cheaper?
- nh2 5y agoWhen was that? I also asked Hetzner for GPU instances after they took down the ones from the website, and a price list was not available at the time, but for a sufficiently sized order they said they would provide me some.
- k8sToGo 5y agoI thought it is possible to send them your own GPU and they would put it in your server.
- buildbot 5y agoThere’s vast.ai!