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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'

by 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.
  - pcthrowaway 5y ago
    And this is a cloud service is it not?
    - marcan_42 5y ago
      A dedicated server isn't usually considered a "cloud" service. It's a physical server allocated to you, with unmetered bandwidth and local disk.
      - pcthrowaway 5y ago
        Where do you get bare metal servers for that cheap? I assumed by VPS you were talking about a VM
        marcan_42 5y ago
        The VPS was a VM, but I moved from that to dedicated a long time ago. Hetzner has nice dedicated servers for €33/mo: https://www.hetzner.com/sb https://www.hetzner.com/sb I'm on an older one that just got bumped up to €29/mo due to increasing electricity prices; it was €21/mo until now, and I can't blame them for that one. The specs are E3-1245 V2 / 16GB / 2x3T, there's over 45 vhosts on it across ~25 wwwroots plus other random services, and CPU usage is basically nothing. The cores are really there just to handle bursty stuff. Most random side projects and small websites don't need almost any resources on modern hardware. Previously I was on a Scaleway Dedibox, which go as low as €15/mo right now. It was €10 at one point even. https://www.scaleway.com/en/dedibox/start/start-2-s-sata/ https://www.scaleway.com/en/dedibox/start/start-2-s-sata/
- TacticalCoder 5y ago
  > and pay an ISP $$$ for unusually high upload bandwidth/throughput? But the ISPs I know do not bill $$$ if you use the max bandwidth (max bandwith they did advertize to you btw) for a sustained amount of time: they'll just start throttling you. Anyway GP ain't asking about "cloud vs hosting at home" but about "cloud vs dedicated server(s)".
papito 5y ago
My cloud costs for my micro instance are about $12 a month. Multiple domains on there. I don't use RDS, ElasticCache, not even load balancers. If you want to keep the costs reasonable, you must roll that stuff on your own, which is totally possible (and free), and in fact kind of fun as a learning experience.

by hnbad 5y ago

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.
- pcthrowaway 5y ago
  And this is a cloud service is it not?
  - marcan_42 5y ago
    A dedicated server isn't usually considered a "cloud" service. It's a physical server allocated to you, with unmetered bandwidth and local disk.
    - pcthrowaway 5y ago
      Where do you get bare metal servers for that cheap? I assumed by VPS you were talking about a VM
      - marcan_42 5y ago
        The VPS was a VM, but I moved from that to dedicated a long time ago. Hetzner has nice dedicated servers for €33/mo: https://www.hetzner.com/sb https://www.hetzner.com/sb I'm on an older one that just got bumped up to €29/mo due to increasing electricity prices; it was €21/mo until now, and I can't blame them for that one. The specs are E3-1245 V2 / 16GB / 2x3T, there's over 45 vhosts on it across ~25 wwwroots plus other random services, and CPU usage is basically nothing. The cores are really there just to handle bursty stuff. Most random side projects and small websites don't need almost any resources on modern hardware. Previously I was on a Scaleway Dedibox, which go as low as €15/mo right now. It was €10 at one point even. https://www.scaleway.com/en/dedibox/start/start-2-s-sata/ https://www.scaleway.com/en/dedibox/start/start-2-s-sata/
TacticalCoder 5y ago
> and pay an ISP $$$ for unusually high upload bandwidth/throughput? But the ISPs I know do not bill $$$ if you use the max bandwidth (max bandwith they did advertize to you btw) for a sustained amount of time: they'll just start throttling you. Anyway GP ain't asking about "cloud vs hosting at home" but about "cloud vs dedicated server(s)".

papito 5y ago

My cloud costs for my micro instance are about $12 a month. Multiple domains on there. I don't use RDS, ElasticCache, not even load balancers. If you want to keep the costs reasonable, you must roll that stuff on your own, which is totally possible (and free), and in fact kind of fun as a learning experience.