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> Looking at our VPS provider bills each month makes me cringe. Hosting costs often go up slowly over the years, and eventually, you have an unsustainable pric

> Looking at our VPS provider bills each month makes me cringe. Hosting costs often go up slowly over the years, and eventually, you have an unsustainable price. Just get quotes from a few other providers and go back to your current host and ask what they can do about the 70% price difference. > Has anyone done this and what was your experience? 2/3 of the companies I own are on AWS. The other company is on dedicated, colocated hardware. The one on dedicated hardware gets zero benefit from CDN and cloud services as it's just a Django/Mysql monolith where every request and response are going to be different. We moved it off of AWS because there was little benefit, and we would reduce our hosting costs to a few hundred dollars a month for 20x more hardware performance. > How do you manage the hardware and how much savings in time/$ is there really? For the two companies on AWS, it saves us three $100k/year salaries per year. So, yes, it's more expensive than colocated hardware, but a lot less expensive than the colocated hardware and the three additional people required to provide support and ensure service levels. For the colocated hardware, we use fabric (an old python ssh automation library) to manage the servers and make heavy use of systemd's logging and systemctl for managing processes and logs. It works well, and there's maybe 1 hr a month of actual admin work, mostly dealing with OS updates and the occasional deployment hiccup.

cat199 5y ago
> less expensive than the colocated hardware and the three additional people required to provide support and ensure service levels i often hear people comparing cloud vs colo but not including more traditional dedicated hardware rental - seems to me this should be pretty similar, maintenance wise to cloud since H/W is handled by the vendor (just need to monitor hardware faults in addition to OS/app layer & notify DC on issues)
- lazide 5y ago
  The difference is that in cloud you get live migration (generally) that works. So if whatever machine you are on dies, you don’t have an expensive and disruptive rebuild/restore cycle to deal with. Since this can take a day+ even once you get new hardware, and architecting most software stacks so you have the redundancy and ability to migrate services around without downtime is hard, and hence expensive if you don’t have the expertise (AND randomly available time), running on dedicated rented hardware really shouldn’t be compared to cloud. It’s a fundamentally different type of experience for the vast majority of people.
  - nfsdnd 5y ago
    When did any cloud provider other than Google get live migration?
    - dilyevsky 5y ago
      GCP definitely live migrates and it’s well documented. Azure and OCI do too but details are a bit less clear. AWS does not afaik
  - manbart 5y ago
    Solutions like VMware vCenter work well for live migrating, cluster balancing, HA priority etc. it’s not exactly a cheap product though.
imperialdrive 5y ago
You would likely recoup the costs and possibly earn terrific ROI by having 3 additional smart cookies on board full time since it would only take a couple hours per month to manage COLO. Maybe even less. AWS is a beast on its own and unmanaged can lead to a ticking time bomb of a mess.
- indymike 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure adding $300,000 in salary to manage a $300/mo hosting bill isn't the best idea... but I do agree they'd be able to do more that just wait for something to break. AWS isn't bad if you have some discipline.
  - fivea 5y ago
    > I'm pretty sure adding $300,000 in salary to manage a $300/mo hosting bill isn't the best idea... $300/month would be one bill from the total cost of operating a service. Just because that bill is relatively low, that does not take away from the value provided by the service. Let's put it the other way around: would it suddenly become a good idea to hire a bunch of engineers to manage the exact same service if the hosting service decided to bump up it's cost?
    - indymike 5y ago
      Ok, so the AWS bill is roughly $1,500 per company. That includes CDN, DNS, backup/restore, load balancing, serverless functions, database hosting, geographic redundancy, file storage, firewall, log aggregation, a data warehouse shared memory cache, web servers and utility servers. I'd estimate each company could probably host all of it on four or five dedicated servers, and let's say we got the deal of the year on dedicated hosts: $50 per server. So, the hosting bill is $250/month. That leaves $1250 to manage everything and staff for operations on nights and weekends. Since the number of servers is small, there's no geographic redundancy, so we're at higher risk of an outage. There's a huge advantage here, and the truth is that over time, prices have went down, not up for cloud services. The priceless part is that I'm not ever on call, for most server problems, and my tech team has a much higher quality of life because they are not on call on nights and weekends either. The flipside is that other company, the one where dedicated servers/colocation made perfect sense. The infrastructure is smaller needing only backup/restore, web server, load balancer, database server. The hosting company can easily handle most of the commodity issues, and our team is only really managing application deployment, so it works.

cat199 5y ago

> less expensive than the colocated hardware and the three additional people required to provide support and ensure service levels i often hear people comparing cloud vs colo but not including more traditional dedicated hardware rental - seems to me this should be pretty similar, maintenance wise to cloud since H/W is handled by the vendor (just need to monitor hardware faults in addition to OS/app layer & notify DC on issues)

lazide 5y ago
The difference is that in cloud you get live migration (generally) that works. So if whatever machine you are on dies, you don’t have an expensive and disruptive rebuild/restore cycle to deal with. Since this can take a day+ even once you get new hardware, and architecting most software stacks so you have the redundancy and ability to migrate services around without downtime is hard, and hence expensive if you don’t have the expertise (AND randomly available time), running on dedicated rented hardware really shouldn’t be compared to cloud. It’s a fundamentally different type of experience for the vast majority of people.
- nfsdnd 5y ago
  When did any cloud provider other than Google get live migration?
  - dilyevsky 5y ago
    GCP definitely live migrates and it’s well documented. Azure and OCI do too but details are a bit less clear. AWS does not afaik
- manbart 5y ago
  Solutions like VMware vCenter work well for live migrating, cluster balancing, HA priority etc. it’s not exactly a cheap product though.

imperialdrive 5y ago

You would likely recoup the costs and possibly earn terrific ROI by having 3 additional smart cookies on board full time since it would only take a couple hours per month to manage COLO. Maybe even less. AWS is a beast on its own and unmanaged can lead to a ticking time bomb of a mess.

indymike 5y ago
I'm pretty sure adding $300,000 in salary to manage a $300/mo hosting bill isn't the best idea... but I do agree they'd be able to do more that just wait for something to break. AWS isn't bad if you have some discipline.
- fivea 5y ago
  > I'm pretty sure adding $300,000 in salary to manage a $300/mo hosting bill isn't the best idea... $300/month would be one bill from the total cost of operating a service. Just because that bill is relatively low, that does not take away from the value provided by the service. Let's put it the other way around: would it suddenly become a good idea to hire a bunch of engineers to manage the exact same service if the hosting service decided to bump up it's cost?
  - indymike 5y ago
    Ok, so the AWS bill is roughly $1,500 per company. That includes CDN, DNS, backup/restore, load balancing, serverless functions, database hosting, geographic redundancy, file storage, firewall, log aggregation, a data warehouse shared memory cache, web servers and utility servers. I'd estimate each company could probably host all of it on four or five dedicated servers, and let's say we got the deal of the year on dedicated hosts: $50 per server. So, the hosting bill is $250/month. That leaves $1250 to manage everything and staff for operations on nights and weekends. Since the number of servers is small, there's no geographic redundancy, so we're at higher risk of an outage. There's a huge advantage here, and the truth is that over time, prices have went down, not up for cloud services. The priceless part is that I'm not ever on call, for most server problems, and my tech team has a much higher quality of life because they are not on call on nights and weekends either. The flipside is that other company, the one where dedicated servers/colocation made perfect sense. The infrastructure is smaller needing only backup/restore, web server, load balancer, database server. The hosting company can easily handle most of the commodity issues, and our team is only really managing application deployment, so it works.