18 ms·

Can somebody explain to me why I wouldn't just rent a 40 EUR dedicated server from Hetzner with unlimited traffic and gigabit uplink? His 600GB/day is way less

• unixhero 5y ago
  You are not wrong. Hetzner would be a good choice instead.
• technion 5y ago
  He is a Microsoft MVP. A title that is given for being a "community evangelist" of Microsoft. You wouldn't get that throwing it on a Heztner machine. Edit: Consider this article, and Geoff's statement about Azure credits. https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/21/microsoft_revokes_mvp_status/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/21/microsoft_revokes_mvp...
  • fs111 5y ago
    Sounds like a pretty expensive privilege. How is using cloudflare okay in this then? Cloudflare is also not Azure
    • rcarmo 5y ago
      There are plenty of people using both, it's a good combination.
      • dewey 5y ago
        The point is about Cloudflare not being from Microsoft / Azure which is the company he's evangelising for.
        • stavros 5y ago
          But you can't use CloudFlare instead of Azure, so it's within scope for him.
          • gwd 5y ago
            And moreover, from what it sounds like, you can't use Azure without Cloudflare either (unless you have a lot of cash you want to burn). Microsoft will get a lot more business from someone advertising their "Azure with Cloudflare" setup than they will from someone advertising their "Azure without Cloudflare" setup. (Edit: fix spelling)
        • rwmj 5y ago
          Presumably MSFT don't have a competing product. It's like asking why he's hosting it on Intel processors.
    • Hamuko 5y ago
      >Sounds like a pretty expensive privilege. Well, it might also come with contacts in the billing department.
      • jsiepkes 5y ago
        Apparantly you also get 13K a year in credits (mentioned in the article): > I'm going to miss the $13,000 USD (yes) a year in free azure credits. Just remember this amount of money when you are reading content about "how good azure is" and "what the latest and greatest is" from influencers and community leaders here on social media...
        • FpUser 5y ago
          The company I know got $200K in credits as their sweet initial deal. They were fully intent to stay inside that limit or close to it. Next thing I see them being slapped with $700K bill and managers running like headless chickens all over development floor and yelling to turn off every VM, hard drive, database / whatever either resources.
    • csours 5y ago
      I don't think Azure offers a Cloudflare alternative, and I'm not sure they ever would - Cloudflare is too good and too cheap to compete against.
      • audiometry 5y ago
        It's not that good. I'm constantly getting "Access Blocked" to various websites by Cloudflare trying to protect them....from me reading them.
        • yetihehe 5y ago
          I never do. Maybe you or something on your computer or network is the problem?
          • capableweb 5y ago
            Usually it's because they live in a different country than what people consider the "Western World" or something like that. When I'm in Europe, I don't see that page very often, unless in Eastern Europe. But if I'm in Asia, Africa or Central/South America, then I encounter that page all the time.
            • Godel_unicode 5y ago
              Fwiw, this is an option that many people configure for themselves in cloudflare. Some security people love recommending using IP geo-blocking as a good tactic for hardening systems.
          • raxxorrax 5y ago
            If you configured your client to hide enough information, Cloudflare tends to believe you are a threat. VPN users probably have that problem a lot more.
            • can16358p 5y ago
              You don't have to hide any information. I don't hide any information and still get blocked because of the country I reside in.
    • dachryn 5y ago
      Azure is integrated with Cloudflare, if you chose to do so. They also offer Azure CDN, as a competing product. But I don't know if anybody takes it serious or not
      • nunez 5y ago
        Azure CDN is fronted by Akamai; lots of retailers use it, but it's not as big as cloudfront afaik
        • jaywalk 5y ago
          There's also Verizon and Microsoft's own CDN. Personally, I use Verizon because Akamai doesn't support wildcard purge.
    • NicoJuicy 5y ago
      Cloudflare is a partner of Azure ( or vice versa). = Azure has an integration to use cloudflare for the cdn. https://www.cloudflare.com/multi-cloud/azure/ https://www.cloudflare.com/multi-cloud/azure/
      • ketanip 5y ago
        Cloudflare Bandwidth Alliance.
    • patrec 5y ago
      > Sounds like a pretty expensive privilege. I'd be suprised if his Microsoft Regional Director and MVP status isn't worth much more than 4 figures to him. Those seeking to initiate engagements with Troy might care more about the fact that he pops up on HN and other high profile tech outlets frequently and the visibility of Have I Been Pwned, but the Regional Director status probably helps a lot with getting some of these engagements signed off. He probably also receives significant subsidies from Microsoft as well.
    • windexh8er 5y ago
      The simple answer here is that Troy was using Cloudflare to offset costs he knew he would incur with Azure. He states verbatim: "Firstly, I always knew bandwidth on Azure was expensive and I should have been monitoring it better, particularly on the storage account serving the most data." ...and he didn't have simple monitors in place to alert him of uncommon billing spikes. I get your point, if he's not OK with using Hetzner how is Cloudflare any better? It's not. But the reality is Cloud operations are a fine dance of weaving services together to realize all of the heavily advertised savings. I'd argue that a lot of Troy's projects that use all of the cloud native functions could have also been implemented on much more standard stacks and, likely, been just as cost and performance effective. But that's not going to get him the advertising for Microsoft.
      • b112 5y ago
        There are no savings with cloud, weaving or not. You want to waste money? Hire a car, with a driver, when you need it. Want to save money. Learn to drive. You always pay more for outsourcing stuff, a lot more, than doing it yourself. You can buy 1000x the processing power, by buying baremetal. You can get 100,000x more bandwith for cost, when not using the cloud. People think baremetal is hard. It isn't. It does take knowledge.
        • never_a-pickle 5y ago
          Re: Cloud. Not all cloud scenarios are the same. If the cost is amortized over a long time (theoretically infinite, well that's the plan) then the immediate convenience can outweigh the cost/opportunity cost. For example if you used Backblaze to backup one personal computer at the cost of $6/mo, if you have a lot of data that becomes a huge source of savings compared to managing the backups yourself. At that price the ROI versus other methods like building a trueNAS may not be within a decade, and I'd argue the storage enthusiasts have probably refreshed all their drives within that time and the ROI would never come even if Backblaze doubled their prices. What you do get is that self hosting becomes a hobby, and that's what I feel it is for most people. Hiring a personal car is more expensive because you are hiring a personal employee. That said, I still argue for personal autonomy alone learning to do the thing is better in general, but I don't think it's because it's cheaper in all scenarios. And to your point some or maybe even most cloud services are more expensive relative to their self hosted versions.
  • vegai_ 5y ago
    • elorant 5y ago
      MVP can mean a lot of things depending on the context. In this case it means Most Valuable Professional.
  • dustinmoris 5y ago
    • viraptor 5y ago
      That's really extreme. How about: Keep in mind that any review may be paid for? FWIW, he complained a lot about Ubiquiti issues on his podcast, so it's not like he can't say bad things about them. (as in half an episode about the controller dropping his configuration or something like that) > selling on stolen password data [...] that he will never talk about How do you know about it then? That's really a [citation needed] quote.
      • dustinmoris 5y ago
        • viraptor 5y ago
          I was quoting you. But I'm sure you could figure out the meaning anyway: what's the source for that information that you claim he keeps a secret. Partially it even works the other way - FBI and others are feeding data into hibp https://www.troyhunt.com/open-source-pwned-passwords-with-fbi-feed-and-225m-new-nca-passwords-is-now-live/ https://www.troyhunt.com/open-source-pwned-passwords-with-fb...
  • pdimitar 5y ago
    Grooming influential people to promote your corp and then bullying them when they didn't turn out to be just parroting your marketing slogans. Classic corporations.
  • nunez 5y ago
    Lol I KNEW IT! An independent consultant blogging about awesome things in Azure? #doubt Seriously, yeah, if he's an MVP, he'll be fine.
  • kingcharles 5y ago
    Huh. As an MVP myself (of DRM lol) I have to agree that was a poor astroturfing idea of Microsoft's. Although one employee != Microsoft. In all my MVP years Microsoft has never asked me to do anything like that. They've sent me to cool parties and events, but never asked for me to do anything as a result.
• tester756 5y ago
  I'm fan of cheap VPSes too, but I'd like to have things like metrics out of the box
  • tlamponi 5y ago
    €40 gives you a dedicated server, not just a VPS. Getting metrics on that is not a hard problem, there are various projects that are relatively simple to set up. If you want to make it easier manage resources, metrics out of the box, and avoid (hoster) lock-in then I'd use a hyper visor distro like Proxmox VE (disclaimer, am a dev there) or the like, and you can migrate (or backup/restore) VMs or Containers easily to other providers. That gives you a (relatively) simple web-interface to manage most things and also opens the possibility to just add a second or third dedicated host down the line to scale out, if those new hosts are in the same DC or have a good interconnect (latency wise) you could even cluster the nodes.
    • maccard 5y ago
      To make a fair comparison you need to consider the time cost for setting all of that other stuff up compared to having it out of the box. I'd an engineer on 100k takes a week to get it up and running then your vps cost 2k to set up and 40/month going forwards.
      • ihateolives 5y ago
        You'd have to figure out the setting up stuff just once though and then automate it. It's not like you have to go through this for every additional server you will add in the future or when you have to rebuild it. Also, it doesn't take a week.
        • maccard 5y ago
          > You'd have to figure out the setting up stuff just once though and then automate it. You're assuming that this is for recurringly set up infrastructure. Sometimes infra is set up once and maintained, othertimes it's set up and spun down. It's also not always automated. The time spent automating something like that might not be worth it in the medium to even long term. > Also, it doesn't take a week. The actual amount of time it takes doesn't matter; if it's a day or a month. what matters is costing the time spent on setting it up and maintaining it, and pricing that against AWS costs.
• closeparen 5y ago
  Perhaps for the same reason that the vast majority of the readers of this site don’t use Hetzner: they are not European and neither are their users.
  • lpcvoid 5y ago
    Hetzner is just an example - you can get cheap dedicated boxes with gigabit uplinks all over the world. And in this example it's not even important what latency the server has, since it was only feeding Cloudflares CDN with data.
    • closeparen 5y ago
      Can you? I have not actually been able to identify a cheap, reputable dedicated server provider in the US. Ten years ago there were a few.
  • vitro 5y ago
    OVH then? They have similar offerings, unlimited traffic, multiple datacenters to pick from.
    • capableweb 5y ago
      I guess that's out of the question too if it's a problem that the company is European, since OVH is French.
  • hnbad 5y ago
    The reason Europeans tend to favor European service providers generally has to do with strong data protection guarantees and some level of protection against foreign surveillance. In practice a lot of European companies still use US services or at least services provided by US companies -- Troy Hunt is Australian and uses Azure from Microsoft, so this isn't just a thing Europeans do either. I'd love to hear your reasoning why people who aren't European would prefer to avoid European service providers.
    • 5y ago
• bennyp101 5y ago
  Because it's not cool, and won't make your CV sparkle. I'm sure there becomes a point where cost of (hardware + maintenance + staffing) > (cloud + staffing), in which case sure crack on. But like you, I'll stick to a rented server for my stuff.
  • omegalulw 5y ago
    The direction is opposite IMO. As you grow bigger on prem starts making a lot more sense.
    • octoberfranklin 5y ago
      I think the case is for big companies that have a hard time attracting IT talent. Like, not in an even remotely IT-related industry, and their headquarters is in a city with no significant tech community. Places that scream "working here will not improve your resume". I'm a major cloud skeptic, but there's a certain class of giant enterprisey companies that are never going to be able to attract good IT talent, and if they "just throw money" at the hiring problem they'll be innundated with slick imposters. I think cloudy stuff lets those companies outsource a large chunk of something they'll never be good at. The cavalcade of Microsoft/Cisco certifications were an earlier decade's attempt at solving the same problem.
      • dx034 5y ago
        I believe renting dedicated servers is often overlooked. You pay someone else to install hardware, ensure network connections and be on-site for hardware swaps etc but still have the maximum degree of flexibility. Even larger companies can work well with that model, traffic also tends to be cheap enough that you can spread across different vendors to avoid lock-in. And in that case, your sysadmins can sit wherever they want, no need to be physically close to the servers. Also, as there's much less knowledge to be a dedicated server provider, competition is strong and prices are comparably low.
        • pooper 5y ago
• hardwaresofton 5y ago
  Well there’s a gap between the amount of convenience you get on the major clouds and one like Hetzner. I’m a huge Hetzner fan, and their cloud offering is definitely growing but still isn’t as convenient and featureful as it could be (and they don’t share their roadmap currently so hard to tell what they’re working on next). I’m trying to do something about it though, working on Nimbus Web Services[0]. In my mind all we need is something to bridge the managed services gap and make it very easy to set up the basic 3 tier app with some amount of scale/performance elasticity! [0]: https://nimbusws.com https://nimbusws.com
  • dx034 5y ago
    But he could've put static files on a Hetzner server and still have his backend in Azure. That would've solved these issues and probably saved even more money.
    • hardwaresofton 5y ago
      Being able to run a relatively simple global cache with a cheap provider like Hetzner has the origin is also harder than it should have to be.
      • hrrsn 5y ago
        apt install nginx
        • hardwaresofton 5y ago
          Apologies wasn't clear -- what I meant was the difficulty of setting up NGINX AND setting up a CDN to serve your content as fast as possible from multiple places is harder than it should be. They're both relatively simple tasks in this day and age but they're not connected/brain-dead-easy for a vendor like Hetzner. Honestly, they're not even connected/brain-dead-easy for a vendor like AWS particularly -- you still have to click around a lot or write a bit of terraform/aws-cdk/etc when all you really want to do is throw a folder or zip file over the wall and point it at a domain. There are tools like Ness[0] out there which look like a breath of fresh air but there needs to be more tools like that where the supported backends include a cloud like Hetzner/Leaseweb/OVH.
• that_guy_iain 5y ago
  > As far as I am concerned, I just don't understand why people use cloud services. For companies the benefits are the abiltiy to get new servers at a click of a button and get rid of a server. For example, asking the ops team to setup a snapshot of a database for a few hours while I do something is super useful. There is also the ability to use autoscale and other stuff to automagically scale your system to handle traffic peaks. With dedcicated servers you need to always have those resources available. It's attractive to managers that they're only paying for resources when they're using it. There are also managed services like DynamoDb, Lambda, S3, etc that can make things easier and reduce your sysadmin work. And allow you to get up and running very quickly. Obivously, a major downside is that the pricing is extremely vulnerable to spikes like this. I think we see an article like this every 3 months or so. This one is rather tame compared to some others that were 10x as much for a 24-hour period.
  • withinboredom 5y ago
    Hetzner dedicated server * 3 + k3s + vnet + longhorn + metallb = basically the cloud. I can snapshot a database disk with a click of a button and restore the snapshot with yet another few clicks. I have 1.5 TB of highly available disk space, 40 cores of full CPU power, 160 GB of RAM, & dynamically provisioned IPs for metallb. For only $130USD a month. For the same price in Azure, I had 6 CPU cores & 8 GB RAM.
    • that_guy_iain 5y ago
      You could do that. But let's say need 4x vCPU: 72, Memory (GiB): 144 for 4 hours. Or you need that 12 hours a day but for the rest of the time you need 2 cpu and 4 GiB of memory. You need to handle traffic spikes such as TV traffic. Yes you could self-host a cloud env but you can't scale your resources the way you can with cloud.
      • christophilus 5y ago
        I’ve never worked anywhere where that was really necessary. Even when I worked at Microsoft, the services my team built needed to be big scale, high perf, etc… But they would have easily run on a fixed number of beefy machines even at our peak load for a fraction of the cost of Azure.
• dt3ft 5y ago
  Not much to explain, you're absolutely right. Hetzner would have been a much wiser choice here, but advocating any cloud provider at this scale probably has its perks too or he wouldn't be burning his money. Then again, perks only go so long and at some point do come to an end, so this is why he may be writing about costs right now. Take a look at their datacenter in Germany: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eo8nz_niiM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eo8nz_niiM
  • octoberfranklin 5y ago
    Wow, that video is fascinating. Love how they are totally not ashamed to kick off the video with their collection of 14,000 mini-tower desktop PCs. Not rackmounted. Mini-towers. Also totally ultra-curious about the PS/2 kvm. All those machines are from an era when USB keyboards had been around a long time already. Wondering if this is a security measure...
• zarzavat 5y ago
  > I just don't understand why people use cloud services. 1, when they need to adjust rapidly between different resource usage profiles, e.g. because they are growing rapidly and can't predict what the usage will be X days in advance 2. They have huge resource requirements and don't care to invest in their own infrastructure, but can negotiate lower rates with a cloud provider 3. When their resource usage is modest but profitability is high enough that cloud expenditure is a rounding error
  • dmurray 5y ago
    4. When their resource usage used to be modest, so they got on cloud services for increased developer convenience, and now can't afford the switching costs even though their bills are expensive.
  • tlamponi 5y ago
    > 1, when they need to adjust rapidly between different resource usage profiles, e.g. because they are growing rapidly and can't predict what the usage will be X days in advance One can add new servers in minutes, removing has a bit more latency to it, but I'd figure with the huge price difference between rented and cloud you'll come out on top with the former in most case. Also, just use a clustering or orchestration layer in between, they range from very simple to setup and use (e.g., Proxmox VE), to quite complex but also very capable (OpenShift, kubernetes, ...). > 2. They have huge resource requirements and don't care to invest in their own infrastructure, but can negotiate lower rates with a cloud provider Using hetzner or other providers is not investing in their own infra, that's using (= renting) the providers infra and ability (peering, fast uplinks, datacenter perks like utility redundancy and staff on site). The second sentence may be true but probably not for most use cases that aren't huge yet, like the post here. > 3. When their resource usage is modest but profitability is high enough that cloud expenditure is a rounding error IFF, yes, and often infra costs are relatively low compared to salary costs, so that's definitively some optimization problem one should go through when deciding such things. Chances are that for most projects the profitability can be good but not magic money printing and infra costs are a non-negligible part that eats on their revenue, and then it's definitively worthwhile to think about avoiding the high premium most of those cloud offerings ask for.
• rcarmo 5y ago
  Because they provide managed services that VPS hosters don't have or which would require the overhead of maintaining and patching servers, and many people just want to get on with their lives instead of worrying about OS exploits...
  • martin_a 5y ago
    That's why you take some kind of "managed hosting" where all of this is taken care of.
    • immibis 5y ago
      like AWS?
      • martin_a 5y ago
        More like sth. starting at 35 €/month for 20 TB of traffic. Hetzner has something like that, shared managed webhosting is even cheaper.
  • alpaca128 5y ago
    But they do offer managed servers.
• fuzzy2 5y ago
  That dedicated server you have to manage (ensure security, install the software you need, keep it updated and secure etc). It’s not for everyone. Also, as you can see in a screenshot on TFA: Some services are simply dirt cheap. The storage account and its various “sub-services” is such a thing. It’s hard to compete with dedicated hardware here. Depending on your dedicated hosting provider, the traffic cost trap exists, too. Hetzner is a bit of a special case.
  • creshal 5y ago
    > That dedicated server you have to manage (ensure security, install the software you need, keep it updated and secure etc). It’s not for everyone. Hetzner also offers managed servers where all this is taken care of, for relatively fair prices.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • sourcecodeplz 5y ago
      Basically the $40 server becomes $80 when managed by them.
      • KingOfCoders 5y ago
        You can use their cloud offering $4/month, 20TB traffic.
  • ghughes 5y ago
    > ensure security, install the software you need, keep it updated and secure etc These things are now trivial enough that it doesn't make sense to pay 10x the cost of bare metal for a cloud provider to solve them for you unless you have a crazy amount of runway or absolutely no idea what you're doing.
    • snovv_crash 5y ago
      Or unless your traffic is so low that the marginal cost differences are something you can swallow. I've been running something on AppEngine for 10 years and it costs me less than $1 a month. Not sure I could find a cheaper VPS. On the other hand, I also manage a Mediawiki install, and a cheap Hetzner VPS works great for this.
• hnbad 5y ago
  I think it is an irresponsible fad that people use cloud services for hobby projects (and despite its wide popularity I'm calling HIBP a hobby project since he's running it on the side for free) unless they have solid cloud ops experience from their day job. Cloud providers love it when people do this and are famously easy to talk to when you get an unexpected invoice high enough to require remortgaging your house to even begin addressing it, but I think unless you're working on a side hustle that inherently will need to run in the cloud regardless of scale or are experimenting with cloud technologies in an explicitly time boxed toy project, using cloud services is the financial equivalent of handing a hobbyist craftsperson one of these chainsaw angle grinder attachments that even professionals find hard to keep from bouncing into your body. If you do want to use cloud services for anything you pay out of your own pocket, the first consideration should be cost management and monitoring. Your employer might have big enough pockets to shrug off a runaway compute instance you forgot about for a month, but that can quickly translate into money that can be anything from inconvenient to life altering if it comes out of your personal budget. Or just stick with the free tier and make sure everything simply shuts down if you run out. Sure, a "bandwidth exceeded" error page might not get you as many upvotes on HN, Reddit or social media, but it also won't impair your finances.
  • pcthrowaway 5y ago
    I don't know what the alternative is. Run a home server and pay an ISP $$$ for unusually high upload bandwidth/throughput? 99/100 times running it in the cloud is going to be cheaper, easier, and more resilient. Of course, the delayed sticker shock is a problem.. I think Google cloud actually lets you create a budget that turns services off if they go over, so there's a solution here if you run a hobby project that you suspect might take off and cost you more than it's worth.
    • marcan_42 5y ago
      I've variously paid $5-$30 a month for a VPS/dedicated server to host all my random side projects over almost two decades, including websites for other people, email, etc; there's probably two dozen or more sites running on my Hetzner dedicated server, with storage and CPU and RAM to more than spare. And not once had to worry about extra fees or weird billing issues. Bandwidth has grown from 100Mbps to 1Gbps and I've never had traffic issues.
• pid-1 5y ago
  I have a few dozens of personal projects on AWS using APIGW, Lambda, CloudFront, Dynamo DB and S3. Their monthly cost is something between 0 and a few cents. Stuff like Hertzner is fine, but if you know your way around AWS you realize have massive cost savings. Prob the same for Azure. Finally, in many places 40 EUR for a pet project is actually a lot of money.
  • welterde 5y ago
    Probably would run just fine on a <= 4 euro/month virtual machine too. Of course it doesn't quite scale to zero like APIGW,lambda,etc. but on the other hand you can be fairly confident to not pay more if your pet project suddenly lands on the front page of HN.
    • pid-1 5y ago
      No it wouldn't, because I infrequently need burst (bigger lambdas). As for costs, setting up billing and usage alarms on AWS is absolutely trivial. Finally, using stuff like S3 or dynamo for storage gives me a peace of mind I will never have when managing my own servers.
      • welterde 5y ago
        Out of curiosity, what are the lambdas doing that requires more than 2-4 GB of RAM?
    • viraptor 5y ago
      Keep in mind that the "<= 4 euro/month virtual machine" has maybe 256MB of RAM available and running anything beyond nginx + a web server which needs to be cycled every few days due to memory fragmentation can become challenging. I've tried this many times, but it's just not worth the extra hassle. And I want a vpn, monitoring and database even on the toy project server as a minimum in reality.
      • xfer 5y ago
        Make up your mind: https://www.netcup.eu/vserver/vps.php https://www.netcup.eu/vserver/vps.php
• andi999 5y ago
  Maybe one wants to mantain the application and not the server? Long time ago i booked a vps, install some bsd on it and thought i am good. A month later a ntp security vulnerability was discovered, soon the server was put offline, some 'patch your things asap' not so nice emails came in. From that time my take is one should spend some time probably daily on an own server if one wants to mantain it.
  • sdze 5y ago
    Aren't Azure Compute Nodes also "bare metal"?
    • andi999 5y ago
      I dont know.
    • capableweb 5y ago
      Based on a quick Google search for "Azure Compute Node": > A node is an Azure virtual machine (VM) or cloud service VM > The terms node and VM are used interchangeably occasionally > Azure Batch creates and manages a pool of compute nodes (virtual machines) > In an Azure Batch workflow, a compute node (or node) is a virtual machine that processes a portion of your application's workload So no, seems Azure Compute Nodes are VMs, not bare metal.
  • pmlnr 5y ago
    Right, because a barebone docker hypervisor needs so much admining.
    • immibis 5y ago
      It runs NTP, does it not?
• pmlnr 5y ago
  Hype, HIPPOs, FOMO, buzzword driven resume.
• raxxorrax 5y ago
  > As far as I am concerned, I just don't understand why people use cloud services. I use the credit card of my employer. For my own projects I use my own server for everything. Granted, it doesn't get much traffic. Some offers from cloud providers are pretty good. If you want to scale to more (virtual) machines, it can be more easily done with the usual providers. I also expect Amazon to know more about firewall and reverse proxy configuration, it renews my certificates automatically and has rudimentary services for monitoring of server state. There is a certain convenience to it. Would I recommend cloud based hosting? Absolutely not. You become dependent on the provider and prices are often steep. Even if you do not know much about server security, your unsecured s3 bucket will be far more exposed than your standard db installation on your own server. Better build expertise for systems you have full control over than to invest the time on the details of AWS which are more subjected to change.
• INTPenis 5y ago
  >As far as I am concerned, I just don't understand why people use cloud services. Well that's the first issue. Many people have automated large parts of their infrastructure in this way so that distributing one huge file becomes part of that whole mess. The goal is of course to keep costs down to a minimum. You can actually do a lot with little money using cloud services. But the careful balance is that you can easily miss little details. But how does that differ from any systems administration? The details are just in new areas that didn't exist 5-10 years ago. And the details you miss are more likely to increase cost. And when you process a lot of traffic, you're popular, that can go real fast. 20 years ago in hosting we might get a porn stash on a hacked NT4 server that would draw bandwidth. And back then a whole company might have 100Mbit fiber so you'd notice.
• southerntofu 5y ago
  Just did the calc and 600GB/day is about 55Mbit/s. That's really not a lot and if there's not too much computation server-side you could serve this from a raspberry pi at home (provided you have good uplink). But that's assuming you keep the CloudFlare cache of course, or as author mentioned himself, advertising only torrents for the multi-gig files. I really don't understand the cloud craze. Everything is more complex to debug, more expensive, and more shitty in all the possible ways you can imagine. I mean i was not exactly a fan of the VPS craze 10-15 years ago, but at least it wouldn't automatically ruin your bank account whenever you got a little traffic. Kudos to the author for having so much money (thousands in one month?!) to waste. I wish i did too :)
  • SkipperCat 5y ago
    The cloud is great for scaling. The lead time for new servers deployed in a data center is weeks compared to seconds in the cloud. Plus there's no sunk cost in the cloud - you can turn it off when done and it evaporates. Also, the cloud offers managed software as a service. You don't have to manage your own HA DB cluster or PubSub. It's all just there and it works. That can save you a lot on technical labor costs. But yes, I do agree with your point. If you don't know what you're doing, you can nuke your budget super quick.
    • immibis 5y ago
      The technical ability to scale is a bit meaningless if you can't afford it.
      • alexpotato 5y ago
        Then that becomes part of your business + technology planning conversations: "This is the cost of scaling, this is the cost of owning our own infra, how does that fit into our budgeting and requirements?"
      • eropple 5y ago
        "If you can't afford it" is doing a lot of assuming and a lot of heavy lifting in that statement. Whether or not you can afford it depends strongly on your scaling bounds (how much you need to scale) and how you've chosen to implement it. There are plenty of tools and systems that can present a sufficiently linear cost relationship to load and usage that, should your COGS versus revenue make sense, the marginal cost of increased cloud resources a no-brainer--especially versus always-paid-for hardware. If you don't have such a linear relationship you're as much in the position of deciding whether the project is viable as you are anything else.
• tetha 5y ago
  It depends somewhat on the organizational skillset you have, in my opinion. Current workplace is considering a fully self-hosted stack as a unique selling point for the customers and segments we're in. That means, we have storage and linux admins available, as well as tooling and know-how how to run this securely and efficiently. Thus, placing large and often downloaded files on our file stores at hetzner is very much a no-brainer, because it adds very little workload to the teams maintaining these stores and it's cheap. However, this can be a daunting thing if you don't have this skillset in the org. It can be learned, but that's time spent not working on the product (and it's not trivial to learn good administrative practices from the hell that google results can be). At such a point, a cloud service just costs you less man-hours. And again - it wouldn't be much time for me, but it would be a lot of time if you had to figure all of that out on the fly. That's essentially why the saying goes that cloud services save you time, but cost money.
  • selestify 5y ago
    Where is a good place to learn good administrative practices?
    • cube00 5y ago
      I found the RedHat Security and Hardening Guides useful for this.
• jasode 5y ago
  >Can somebody explain to me why I wouldn't just rent a 40 EUR dedicated server from Hetzner [...] , I just don't understand why people use cloud services. This recurring question of "why AWS/Azure instead of Hetzner/OVH ?" keeps happening because people are incorrectly comparing higher-level PaaS to lower-level IaaS without realizing it. PaaS != IaaS are not equivalent. IaaS is not a direct drop-in replacement for PaaS to save money if the workload is using PaaS features that IaaS does not include. The author Troy Hunt is using the higher-level Azure services like Table Storage (like AWS DynamoDB/SimpleDB) and Azure Functions (like AWS Lambda), and others. E.g. One of the article's hyperlinks talks about using Azure Functions.[1] If he used Hetzner, he'd have to reinvent the Azure services stack with open-source projects (some of which are buggy and immature) and expend extra sysadmin/programming work for something that's not as integrated. The Azure/AWS stack includes many desirable housekeeping tools such as provisioning, monitoring, routing, etc which he'd also have to re-invent. TLDR: People choose Azure/AWS because it has more features out of the box. You just have to figure out on a case-by-case basis if the PaaS value-add makes financial sense for your particular workload. EDIT to downvoters: if Hetzner actually has built-in equivalents to AWS Lambda and DynamoDB, please reply with a correction because I don't want to spread misinformation. [1] https://www.troyhunt.com/serverless-to-the-max-doing-big-things-for-small-dollars-with-cloudflare-workers-and-azure-functions/ https://www.troyhunt.com/serverless-to-the-max-doing-big-thi...
  • forty 5y ago
    Yeah, it feels like someone saying "why don't you build your house yourself? Would be much cheaper". This is certainly true, but - My house is probably going to be build much faster if it's built by professional house builder (even more true for services since it's available immediately) - I have better things to do than building houses
  • marcosdumay 5y ago
    > people are incorrectly comparing higher-level PaaS to lower-level IaaS without realizing it. Hum, no. People are asking what kind of value that platform adds that can justify all that risk. And nobody is giving any clear answer, so I'll stand with my previous answer of "none".
• 6510 5y ago
  He should and did use torrents.
• InsomniacL 5y ago
  - Patching - Remediation, Monitoring, day0 response - Security Information and Event Management - exports, alerts, OS configuration - OS/Application Hardening - Encryption, Password/keys rotation, CIS/other baselines, Drift Management - Backup - Encryption, (don't forget your passwords/keys are changing), retention, data protection compliance, monitoring, alerting, test days - High Availability - replication, synchronisation, monitoring, alerts, test days This is just the tip of the ice berg, if you operate in an environment where Insurance, Reputation, Regulatory Compliance, certification, etc.. are important, then it's easy to see why PAAS solutions are desirable.
  • chillfox 5y ago
    Eh, if my bank goes down or gets compromised then I will hold it against them regardless of if they are self hosting or using the cloud.
    • InsomniacL 5y ago
      Exactly, and using a SQL PAAS solution for example, it will always be patched without the bank having the expense of doing it themselves.
• fbrncci 5y ago
  I have a pretty complicated architecture that would cost me about 20-35$ if it was hosted just on Digitalocean or Hetzner. Instead its AWS ...soon to be multicloud, and costs me about 140$/mo (which does vary). But it does allow me to experiment, write long articles and design some fun stuff; about which I blog on my own website. The blog has gotten me both clients on freelance projects and enough "cred" to start on new projects I don't have any resume experience on. That's the only reason that I personally use cloud services (of course, the reasons for SaaS/Enterprise clients are usually more valid than mine).
  • rhn_mk1 5y ago
    What stops you from having a blog on Hetzner? That doesn't seem like it has anything to do with AWS whatsoever... or do they offer a blogging pltform?
    • immibis 5y ago
      Because the blog is about his experiments in AWS? AWS is cool and all and has a bunch of interesting stuff, it's just expensive.
    • fbrncci 5y ago
      I'm blogging about the experiments I am running with AWS hosted infrastructure. It could be hosted pretty much anywhere, a rpi would be enough. But I can't run those experiments on Hetzner, they simply don't offer as much options as AWS to run experiments.
• 300bps 5y ago
  Where did you get 600 GB per day? That only would’ve cost $8.40 per day. It looks like it was actually 25 TB per day which is over 40x what you said. From the article: This was about AU$350 a day for a month… priced at AU$0.014 per GB A company could not stay in business if every one of their “unlimited 1 Gbps” customers for €40 per month actually used that bandwidth.
• pbalau 5y ago
  Wouldn't riding a horse prevent that car crash?
  • onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
    Horse carriage accidents were surprisingly common and deadly for the low speeds they traveled at - but, I did enjoy the analogy [=
  • kuschku 5y ago
    Luckily you can avoid both by just cycling everywhere. Lower CO2 output and lower cost, too. I use rented dedicated servers for everything, and always travel by bicycle or transit. It's not as ridiculous as you make it seem.
    • pbalau 5y ago
      If I ride a bike from work to home, my fat ass will be terrible unhappy. If I ride a horse, the horse would be. I could drive, but driving in London is not fun. Luckily, there is a decent public transport system that fits my needs. The point is, there is a context for everything and it matters. You might like installing and configuring software, I don't. I'm more than capable of doing so myself, but I'd rather build things on top of other things. I'd rather use a battle tested Secrets Manager and have db replication set up for me. I'm grateful to people that like doing these things I don't and I'm expressing my gratitude by contributing to their paychecks via my cloud bill. To go back to my initial reply, if you change the context, eg the context is driving a car, you can't possible crash the car you are not driving. If the context is "get home after a few too many pints at the pub", then riding a horse is much better than driving a car (and crashing it). Context.
• PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  For such a (relatively) simple architecture: I agree. Easy dedicated server, make a point to watch security updates. The reason to use cloud-style services is so you can focus on building the product quickly instead of building and maintaining architecture. But once the product is stable, a cost-reduction pass is in order.
• lvass 5y ago
  IIRC, hertzner "unlimited" traffic isn't quite unlimited. You have a few monthly TB depending on what you contracted, if you go over it there's massive speed reductions until you pay a fee.
  • xuki 5y ago
    It's truly unlimited now. I know someone who's pushing 1Gbps constantly (selling Plex access) and Hetzner have no issues with it.
  • jerf 5y ago
    In this case, that arguably would have been preferable. A lot of cloud cost objections would be solved if they defaulted to that instead of defaulted to just charging you the fees. That has its own tradeoffs, of course, but I find myself suspicious that the reason the clouds work this way isn't so much a cold and sober consideration of the aforementioned tradeoffs so much as "this way makes more money when we charge people lots of money they weren't expecting" and "this way makes lots of money when the people deploying the service are organizationally and fiscally disconnected from the people paying for it so they care and notice less".
  • FpUser 5y ago
    I do rent from Hetzner and OVH. Before signing contract I emailed them and asked if there are ANY limits / throttling beyond their unlimited 1gbs. They assured me in writing (email) that there are none. Some of my rented servers host giant 4K high video files and transferring those which happens all the time keeps that bandwidth pretty occupied. So far I did not see them impose any throttling. Not on my business anyways.
• dom96 5y ago
  I don't understand why anyone would sign up for services that have an unknown future cost. This is exactly why I avoid Amazon's S3 and prefer something like Digital Ocean (or Hetzner). I would much rather have my service shut down than spend many thousands of dollars because some cache failed.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • erwincoumans 5y ago
    Agreed, I've had large bills for cloud providers, forgetting to terminate a GPU instance, or didn't realize that having a disk image (even not running) costs money. >> why anyone would sign up It happens more often than you think: people sign up for credit cards and forget to pay the monthly bill in full. Sign up for a cell phone plan and get charged with large bills of international roaming. People sign up for monthly subscriptions, and exceed the usage limits.
• api 5y ago
  The entire ecosystem has been herded into complex deployment patterns that make it labor intensive to manage infrastructure without using managed cloud services.
• bluedino 5y ago
  I wonder if the disk on a $40 Hetzner server would be fast/big enough for him. All the searching and storing of massive password hash collections. He has a writeup here on how he gets costs down in a big way: https://www.troyhunt.com/serverless-to-the-max-doing-big-things-for-small-dollars-with-cloudflare-workers-and-azure-functions/ https://www.troyhunt.com/serverless-to-the-max-doing-big-thi...
  • pdimitar 5y ago
    I tried to scan through the linked article (and OP) but couldn't quite figure out Troy's storage requirements. Are they really massive? The sum of the GB figured shown in the OP doesn't even amount to 200GB AFAICT. But even if it's something like 10TB that's still not super expensive on many hosting providers.
    • 300bps 5y ago
      The math says it was 25 TB per day for a month. ($350 per day at .014 per GB)
      • pdimitar 5y ago
        Ah, you mean bandwidth. I meant how much actual storage at rest (HDD size).
    • bluedino 5y ago
      The post wasn't relating to data but more this quote: > It's costing me 2.6c per day to support 141M monthly queries of 517M records. Also, you might be able to store 1TB of data on a spinning disk with no problem but can you run the amount of queries he needs? Will you be able to run them as fast as you need? How much RAM would you need? etc.
• distantsounds 5y ago
  good luck getting a gigabit speeds from a hetzner box in any form of consistency
• vbezhenar 5y ago
  Scalability, reliability, provided maintenance for every aspect (hardware, software, backups).
• lazyant 5y ago
  If you only need a server, as in CPU, RAM, disk and bandwidth, with a more or less constant demand, then sure, a dedicated server is way cheaper than any cloud. You want to use cloud for the ecosystem of other services besides VM/instances, and especially to use them in an automated way. The other use case is elastic demand.
• jenscow 5y ago
  > I just don't understand why people use cloud services. To handle that day of getting 1 million customers, which you've been forever optimising for. Any.. day.. now...