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Honestly you can go very far with unmettered data plans. We consume 2GB/S, maxed out, which ends up being 5184TB a month. We have millions on users a day, all o

Honestly you can go very far with unmettered data plans. We consume 2GB/S, maxed out, which ends up being 5184TB a month. We have millions on users a day, all on a streaming video platform. It cost less than $2K/Month. The cloud is crazy expensive. Private servers are beasts, and they are cheap. Of course, for this price, you don't have redundancy and horizontal scaling. You also don't have to maintain and debug a system with redundancy and horizontal scaling.

nix23 5y ago
Thanks! Exactly that! I always tell that customers and their response is: -But google/facebook/amazon... -But uptime needs to be 99.999 -But everyone uses cloud Most businesses are not a trading-market, have less then 100 peoples (aka you are probably not another amazon), and no bonus using a cloud/kubernetes etc. But it's the same old story, in the 00's i used the ~same arguments against buying OracleDB ;)
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > But it's the same old story, in the 00's i used the ~same arguments against buying OracleDB ;) But no matter how logically convincing your arguments were, most of the time upper manglement just went on buying Oracle, right...?
- XCSme 5y ago
  > uptime needs to be 99.999 Isn't AWS down like every two months for a few hours? That's far off the 99.999% mark. No one can guarantee 100% uptime and sometimes it's even better to have that under your control (eg. have a dedicated server and a backup one from different providers). My point is that, if you want the highest possible uptime, you shouldn't rely on a single (cloud) provider.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  And you can tell them all of those are possible, but they need to have a massive budget, not just for the monthly bills but also to hire experts to set things up with those constraints. I worked at a company once that, from higher up, said that they had to have five nines of uptime. We had some really good cloud engineers there (one guy set up a server / internet container for the military in Afghanistan; in hindsight he said they should've just sent a container of porn dvd's), and they really went to town. For that five nines uptime, you're already pretty much required to set up your infrastructure to use multiple availability zones, everything redundant multiple times, etc. Of course, the actual software we wrote was just a bunch of CRUD services written in nodejs (later scala because IDK), on top of a pile of shit java that abstracted away decades of legacy mainframes.
- dna_polymerase 5y ago
  Either your compute demand is highly elastic, or your revenue and profit scale with usage, otherwise the Cloud is probably not for you. At least not in the longterm or for running websites.
- midasuni 5y ago
  Get two servers, stick them in different cities. $4k a month and you have resilience. $6k a month and you have resilience and double your throughout. Some stuff makes sense to put on iaas, dns often does for example.
  - nix23 5y ago
    4k/mnt for 2 Servers? That's a little bit to much, 200euro for two servers at hetzner is perfectly fine ;)
    - midasuni 5y ago
      I say server, presumably it’s the entire solution of however many servers, storage, network etc. If it’s 2k/month for a non resilient solution, it’s in the order of 4k for a resilient solution (you need to relocate assets both ways but it’s in that order of magnitude)
- mro_name 5y ago
  any single one of those arguments is cargo-cult actually, isn't it? All means, no end.
  - nix23 5y ago
    Well most of them are Non IT businesses, so they just know what peers/family etc told them what todo (or what they do), then read some (oneside-)sponsored media and now they ~know whats best, it's Azure with WindowsServerDatacenter-edition, SQLServer-enterprise and McAffee antivirus ;) but who can be mad about it? It's just not their field of expertise or even interest.
    - mro_name 5y ago
      fair enough, however they juggle the buzzwords. If they didn't but cared about their business (they know I hope) and make hard requirements to IT, that would help. IT should then come up with solutions to those real-world problems. We're not talking just about hobbyists, do we? That's what Eric Evans talks about in DDD as I got it.
      - nix23 5y ago
        > fair enough, however they juggle the buzzwords. Oh absolutely true, you don't want to look completely clueless in front of people who take your money to setup an infrastructure ;) >and make hard requirements to IT, that would help That would make stuff so much more easy. Often it even lacks even a inventory of used applications/hardware....network. Just one example: Made a plan for new hardware and network (new cabling etc), then i walked around the workshop and there was that dusty machine running...i asked what it is...a dos-machine with...wait...TOKENRING. That machine was an integral part of the whole workshop ;) However we made a virtual FreeDOS machine and buy'd a software converter for the machine protocol, the 25yo cnc-machine needed a new card (ethernet instead of token-ring, very lucky we found that thing) so there was that one little DOS-machine no one though about who could stop the whole "modernization".
        5y ago
YetAnotherNick 5y ago
Not including extra human cost in the analysis is just disingenuous. I think to manage private servers of that size you would need at least two extra experts totalling at least $20k/month.
- ralgozino 5y ago
  How many DevOps do you need to manage your cloud? How much do they cost?
  - Dma54rhs 5y ago
    You need high skilled people who are comfortable in AWS or other cloud offering as well. Have to care of tons of things, set them up etc. They are not one button setups in real life when things get complicated.
- capableweb 5y ago
  What?! Maybe if you hire SV-skilled engineers on location in Sillicon Valley, but you can easily serve 2GB/second (on infra worth $2K/month) with one sys-admin dealing with it, and for way less than a whopping $10k/month.
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    > with one sys-admin dealing with it, And if that one sys-admin wants to go on vacation? Or travel away from a computer? Or takes another job? You can never have “just one” admin handling a server and being on-call 24/7. Would you really want a job where you could never, ever be away from a computer because you’re the only on-call person? This doesn’t work.
    - new_guy 5y ago
      > Would you really want a job where you could never, ever be away from a computer because you’re the only on-call person? This doesn’t work. Works fine for me. $20K a month for two people doing f*k all is insane.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> We consume 2GB/S, maxed out, which ends up being 5184TB a month. We have millions on users a day, all on a streaming video platform. > It cost less than $2K/Month. The solution in this article is serving on the order of 100TB/month for $400/month including a high speed global CDN, their API and database servers being hosted reliably, and redundancy and backup being handled by someone else. Your solution is hosting on the order of 1000s of TBs of month (ignoring the database and other aspects of this website), but the price is an order of magnitude higher. You’ve also given up all of the automatic redundancy and hands-off management, and you don’t have the benefit of a high speed global CDN. But more importantly, you have significantly higher engineering and on-call overhead, which you’re valuing at $0. If anything, that only makes Polyhaven’s solution sound more impressive. > Of course, for this price, you don't have redundancy and horizontal scaling. Which is a huge caveat. The global CDN makes a big difference in how the site loads in global locations. Maybe not a big concern if you’re serving of static files with a lot of buffering, but they have a dynamic website and a global audience and they said fast load times are important. > You also don't have to maintain and debug a system with redundancy and horizontal scaling. But you have to do literally everything else manually and maintain it yourself, which is far from free. All of these alternative proposals that value engineering time at $0/hour and assume your engineers are happy to be on-call 24/7 to maintain these servers are missing the point. You pay for turnkey solutions so you don’t have to deal with as much. Engineers don’t actually love to respond to on call events. If you can offload many of your problems to a cloud provider and free up your engineers for a nominal cost, do it.
- mjburgess 5y ago
  One has to presume that they have priced this and found the non-cloud version over-all cheaper. Labour isnt expensive if you're operating towards a minimum needed to function, and your systems are sufficiently operationally stable.
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    > Labour isnt expensive… Engineering labor is definitely expensive. The entire $400/month bill for this linked website will only get you 2-3 hours of consulting time. They’re getting an enormous value by just offloading the work to someone else and not having to worry about it.
kijin 5y ago
You can have redundancy and horizontal scaling with private servers and still end up paying less than what you would on AWS and the like. I have some clients who use AWS and others who prefer colo and/or dedicated servers from traditional datacenters. The latter group can afford to over-provision everything by 3-4x, even across different DC's if necessary. DC's aren't yesterday's dinosaurs anymore. The large ones have a bunch of hardware on standby that you can order at 3 a.m. and start running deployment scripts in minutes.

nix23 5y ago

Thanks! Exactly that! I always tell that customers and their response is: -But google/facebook/amazon... -But uptime needs to be 99.999 -But everyone uses cloud Most businesses are not a trading-market, have less then 100 peoples (aka you are probably not another amazon), and no bonus using a cloud/kubernetes etc. But it's the same old story, in the 00's i used the ~same arguments against buying OracleDB ;)

CRConrad 5y ago
> But it's the same old story, in the 00's i used the ~same arguments against buying OracleDB ;) But no matter how logically convincing your arguments were, most of the time upper manglement just went on buying Oracle, right...?
XCSme 5y ago
> uptime needs to be 99.999 Isn't AWS down like every two months for a few hours? That's far off the 99.999% mark. No one can guarantee 100% uptime and sometimes it's even better to have that under your control (eg. have a dedicated server and a backup one from different providers). My point is that, if you want the highest possible uptime, you shouldn't rely on a single (cloud) provider.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
And you can tell them all of those are possible, but they need to have a massive budget, not just for the monthly bills but also to hire experts to set things up with those constraints. I worked at a company once that, from higher up, said that they had to have five nines of uptime. We had some really good cloud engineers there (one guy set up a server / internet container for the military in Afghanistan; in hindsight he said they should've just sent a container of porn dvd's), and they really went to town. For that five nines uptime, you're already pretty much required to set up your infrastructure to use multiple availability zones, everything redundant multiple times, etc. Of course, the actual software we wrote was just a bunch of CRUD services written in nodejs (later scala because IDK), on top of a pile of shit java that abstracted away decades of legacy mainframes.
dna_polymerase 5y ago
Either your compute demand is highly elastic, or your revenue and profit scale with usage, otherwise the Cloud is probably not for you. At least not in the longterm or for running websites.
midasuni 5y ago
Get two servers, stick them in different cities. $4k a month and you have resilience. $6k a month and you have resilience and double your throughout. Some stuff makes sense to put on iaas, dns often does for example.
- nix23 5y ago
  4k/mnt for 2 Servers? That's a little bit to much, 200euro for two servers at hetzner is perfectly fine ;)
  - midasuni 5y ago
    I say server, presumably it’s the entire solution of however many servers, storage, network etc. If it’s 2k/month for a non resilient solution, it’s in the order of 4k for a resilient solution (you need to relocate assets both ways but it’s in that order of magnitude)
mro_name 5y ago
any single one of those arguments is cargo-cult actually, isn't it? All means, no end.
- nix23 5y ago
  Well most of them are Non IT businesses, so they just know what peers/family etc told them what todo (or what they do), then read some (oneside-)sponsored media and now they ~know whats best, it's Azure with WindowsServerDatacenter-edition, SQLServer-enterprise and McAffee antivirus ;) but who can be mad about it? It's just not their field of expertise or even interest.
  - mro_name 5y ago
    fair enough, however they juggle the buzzwords. If they didn't but cared about their business (they know I hope) and make hard requirements to IT, that would help. IT should then come up with solutions to those real-world problems. We're not talking just about hobbyists, do we? That's what Eric Evans talks about in DDD as I got it.
    - nix23 5y ago
      > fair enough, however they juggle the buzzwords. Oh absolutely true, you don't want to look completely clueless in front of people who take your money to setup an infrastructure ;) >and make hard requirements to IT, that would help That would make stuff so much more easy. Often it even lacks even a inventory of used applications/hardware....network. Just one example: Made a plan for new hardware and network (new cabling etc), then i walked around the workshop and there was that dusty machine running...i asked what it is...a dos-machine with...wait...TOKENRING. That machine was an integral part of the whole workshop ;) However we made a virtual FreeDOS machine and buy'd a software converter for the machine protocol, the 25yo cnc-machine needed a new card (ethernet instead of token-ring, very lucky we found that thing) so there was that one little DOS-machine no one though about who could stop the whole "modernization".
      - 5y ago

YetAnotherNick 5y ago

Not including extra human cost in the analysis is just disingenuous. I think to manage private servers of that size you would need at least two extra experts totalling at least $20k/month.

ralgozino 5y ago
How many DevOps do you need to manage your cloud? How much do they cost?
- Dma54rhs 5y ago
  You need high skilled people who are comfortable in AWS or other cloud offering as well. Have to care of tons of things, set them up etc. They are not one button setups in real life when things get complicated.
capableweb 5y ago
What?! Maybe if you hire SV-skilled engineers on location in Sillicon Valley, but you can easily serve 2GB/second (on infra worth $2K/month) with one sys-admin dealing with it, and for way less than a whopping $10k/month.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > with one sys-admin dealing with it, And if that one sys-admin wants to go on vacation? Or travel away from a computer? Or takes another job? You can never have “just one” admin handling a server and being on-call 24/7. Would you really want a job where you could never, ever be away from a computer because you’re the only on-call person? This doesn’t work.
  - new_guy 5y ago
    > Would you really want a job where you could never, ever be away from a computer because you’re the only on-call person? This doesn’t work. Works fine for me. $20K a month for two people doing f*k all is insane.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> We consume 2GB/S, maxed out, which ends up being 5184TB a month. We have millions on users a day, all on a streaming video platform. > It cost less than $2K/Month. The solution in this article is serving on the order of 100TB/month for $400/month including a high speed global CDN, their API and database servers being hosted reliably, and redundancy and backup being handled by someone else. Your solution is hosting on the order of 1000s of TBs of month (ignoring the database and other aspects of this website), but the price is an order of magnitude higher. You’ve also given up all of the automatic redundancy and hands-off management, and you don’t have the benefit of a high speed global CDN. But more importantly, you have significantly higher engineering and on-call overhead, which you’re valuing at $0. If anything, that only makes Polyhaven’s solution sound more impressive. > Of course, for this price, you don't have redundancy and horizontal scaling. Which is a huge caveat. The global CDN makes a big difference in how the site loads in global locations. Maybe not a big concern if you’re serving of static files with a lot of buffering, but they have a dynamic website and a global audience and they said fast load times are important. > You also don't have to maintain and debug a system with redundancy and horizontal scaling. But you have to do literally everything else manually and maintain it yourself, which is far from free. All of these alternative proposals that value engineering time at $0/hour and assume your engineers are happy to be on-call 24/7 to maintain these servers are missing the point. You pay for turnkey solutions so you don’t have to deal with as much. Engineers don’t actually love to respond to on call events. If you can offload many of your problems to a cloud provider and free up your engineers for a nominal cost, do it.

mjburgess 5y ago
One has to presume that they have priced this and found the non-cloud version over-all cheaper. Labour isnt expensive if you're operating towards a minimum needed to function, and your systems are sufficiently operationally stable.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > Labour isnt expensive… Engineering labor is definitely expensive. The entire $400/month bill for this linked website will only get you 2-3 hours of consulting time. They’re getting an enormous value by just offloading the work to someone else and not having to worry about it.

kijin 5y ago

You can have redundancy and horizontal scaling with private servers and still end up paying less than what you would on AWS and the like. I have some clients who use AWS and others who prefer colo and/or dedicated servers from traditional datacenters. The latter group can afford to over-provision everything by 3-4x, even across different DC's if necessary. DC's aren't yesterday's dinosaurs anymore. The large ones have a bunch of hardware on standby that you can order at 3 a.m. and start running deployment scripts in minutes.