17 ms·

Saving on egress switching from AWS to Hetzner

326 points by zwass 5y ago

gwern 5y ago
> Having heard of Hetzner’s low egress costs (20TB free + €1.19/TB/month), we investigated what it would take to run our own server. My understanding was that they dropped the per-TB billing a few years ago and now it's just uncapped?
- menmob 5y ago
  Dedicated machines have uncapped bandwidth, VMs get 20TB free.
  - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
    1G/s connected machines have uncapped bandwidth, 10G/s machines have a 20TB cap, then €1 /TB.
zwass 5y ago
tl;dr Cloudflare offered a savings over AWS CloudFront, but we saved multiple orders of magnitude DIYing it on Hetzner. So far ops have not been too painful.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  nice, but the article is the opposite of "too long"
lpellegr 5y ago
Great article. I wrote about a similar experience 9 months ago while switching from Google Cloud Storage to Scaleway Object Storage: https://pellegrino.link/2021/05/31/scaleway-object-storage-s3-java-library.html https://pellegrino.link/2021/05/31/scaleway-object-storage-s... Similarly, I saved about x100. For sure, the services do not offer the same level of guarantees and speed but depending on my case it was worth a migration. Looking forward to trying Cloudflare R2 soon!
- zwass 5y ago
  Thank you for sharing! We are also interested in R2, but it sounded like it would not be available for quite some time when we spoke to Cloudflare.
  - ignoramous 5y ago
    Depending on the size of the objects, one could use Workers KV ($5 per 1M writes, $5 per 10M reads, 25M size limit) as a pseudo-R2 store [0] via Workers Unbound (~$1 per 6M requests), especially with the recent optimizations bringing the bills (of Workers Unbound proxying KV) down by 70% [1] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28747798 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28747798 [1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/workers-optimization-reduces-your-bill/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/workers-optimization-reduces-you...
- Dave3of5 5y ago
  Yeah +1 for scaleway been using them for years and they are great.
stavros 5y ago
This is interesting... Is there some distributed caching server one could use for this, for increased uptime? Basically some CDN.
- zwass 5y ago
  This isn't a direct answer to your question, but our use-case is not latency sensitive (and not even particularly uptime sensitive). So far we've got near 100% uptime and if we needed more we could put multiple servers behind a load balancer. That wouldn't help much with latency -- for that I'd think you need some geographic distribution -- exactly what a CDN is good for.
  - stavros 5y ago
    Ah yep, makes perfect sense.
hardwaresofton 5y ago
One thing Hetzner doesn’t have yet (but it SHOULD!) is Object Storage, and it’s something I’m working on over at NimbusWS[0]. Another awesome thing about Hetzner is that bandwidth internally is free and automatically negotiated (i.e if you send traffic to a Hetzner IP it will flow internally). One of the hardest things is being able to tell the bandwidth usage and when it’s inside/outside Hetzner. [0]: https://nimbusws.com https://nimbusws.com
- jopsen 5y ago
  Scaleway has object storage: https://www.scaleway.com/en/pricing/ https://www.scaleway.com/en/pricing/
  - jamil7 5y ago
    Scaleway has awful customer support, beware.
    - thejosh 5y ago
      Yes, run.
    - smarx007 5y ago
      Everyone has (relatively) poor support if you are a budget customer. Scaleway support replied to all my tickets and was professional. Not a 1 hour response but can’t complain for a €5/mo. Been with them for ca 4 years since the ARM days until recently.
  - WaxProlix 5y ago
    Scaleway and Hetzner are cool. What I'd love to see is a lower-cost (if slightly higher-friction?) version of AWS as it was early on. Some sort of analogues for: - S3 - VPC - Compute instances (types don't have to bee too fine grained) - SQS, SNS - Some sort of Dynamo and/or RDS functionality. - Some basic API coordinators, I guess Teraform has providers for lots of stuff these days. Lambda- and fargate-like things would be a plus, but not strictly necessary. I feel like 90% of the projects I've ever built could be easily made and scaled with nothing else. Further features hit diminishing returns really fast, and serve to muddy the waters up around what tooling is best, or even what exists.
iancarroll 5y ago
For those in the Bay Area who are a bit more adventurous, Hurricane Electric charges only $400/mo for a full rack in their Fremont datacenter, along with 1Gbps of bandwidth, and 12A of usable power. It’s totally overkill for the article’s use case, but it enables many cool things that need sustained bandwidth, and has been pretty fun.
- cortesoft 5y ago
  That is a surprisingly small amount of bandwidth for such a large amount of space. A single machine in the rack could easily saturate the network.
  - jcims 5y ago
    Same with 12A of power. It's just the base offering. It's nice to get a full rack though b/c you can be more flexible with organization, have some (physical) storage space for spares, console, accessories, etc.
    - gnu8 5y ago
      If you can get three in a row you can have a place to sleep for $1200/mo.
      - bluedino 5y ago
        You can't sleep standing?
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        Ostrogodsky 5y ago
        Of course, but you have to budget space for your closet
      - jcims 5y ago
mikeryan 5y ago
I feel it’s unwise to simply accept “additional maintenance burden” as a “free” cost unless it’s under an hour or two a month.
- zwass 5y ago
  Fair enough. So far it's been under an hour or two a month! We'll see how that pans out in the longer term.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  The learning curve is definitely different but once that's done, the maintenance is minimal (modern hardware is surprisingly reliable from my experience). Most maintenance you'll be doing is software-level stuff (system updates, etc) you'd also need on a cloud-hosted EC2 or similar.
- MrStonedOne 5y ago
  It likely is under that threshold. Also it doesn't matter. Cloud vs vps/colo/rented bare metal basically comes down to surplus of cash vs surplus of tech talent. Any small tech focused company is gonna have more of the latter then the former, and in that situation, cloud doesn't make sense when ansible, k8s, and the like exists.
- christophilus 5y ago
  Security updates are automatic. I haven’t touched my physical servers (not even via ssh) in 6 months. The only reason I did it then was that we moved an app from Node to Go, so I was able to completely remove Node from those servers (which felt great). I think people overestimate how hard it is to run a server.
  - daveidol 5y ago
    Semi-unrelated, but how was your experience moving from Node to Go? Any particular reason/requirement that prompted the change?
  - quickthrower2 5y ago
endisneigh 5y ago
What’s the best way to use generic compute to create an Serverless functions equivalent? I feel that's the best case for this sort of compute here - well, that and build jobs, heh.
- ricktdotorg 5y ago
  i also would be very interested in this!
Ecco 5y ago
Could someone explain what the « website assets » limitation of CloudFlare is about?
- zwass 5y ago
  I can think of two possible reasons: 1) Website assets are generally optimized for size (images, etc.) and so reduce Cloudflare's total cost to service. 2) Cloudflare believes that free tier users who use it for their website assets are more likely to want the other Cloudflare services and therefore convert to paying customers.
- anonymoushn 5y ago
  For example CloudFlare's free tier is not intended to be free transit or storage for other services that are substantially about selling storage and transit. If you make an image-processing CDN type thing, like imgix, CloudFlare does not intend to subsidize almost all of your costs.
TheIronMark 5y ago
> DIYing it does come with additional maintenance burden, but so far we’ve found this manageable. Tune in next month for their article on how much fun manually scaling everything is.
- cpncrunch 5y ago
  The reality is that most startups don't scale exponentially unless they are injecting huge amounts of cash into their company (and in that case they can afford AWS). The company in this article just has a single server.
  - orasis 5y ago
    However, most services that are around for a long time experience bursty traffic so provisioning is still difficult.
    - cpncrunch 5y ago
      It really depends on a lot of factors such as technology, amount of traffic, etc. My server handles about 200 simultaneous users on a few % of cpu. I think most startups will have a smaller load than this unless they become incredibly successful or pour tons of cash into growth.
    - andai 5y ago
      Fun fact: Hacker News runs on a single core.
      - getcrunk 5y ago
        Sarcasm?
        andai 5y ago
        "HN's main software runs on a single core", wrote a moderator when I wrote to ask about why rapid (<2s?) subsequent actions were rejected by the server (ie. like a post and then favorite it). This was November 2020 and he mentioned a big overhaul was in the works (of both HN and Arc, the programming language in which it is written). We've seen new features since then, but the throttling is still there so it seems to still be the same situation regarding fundamental infrastructure.
mabbo 5y ago
It's the same story every day, the same pattern. And it's the same because it works. Startup: use <aws|azure|gcp> because it's quick to get started. It's easy to scale it up 100X in 5 minutes for when you make it big. And it provides a long list of easy to use services that are overpriced per use, but which free you to focus on your business rather than complex DevOps. Then once you scale to the point that you're comparing your salaries and your ops cost, you find smaller services to handle the expensive part of your business. Ones that do exactly what you need, not much else, and charge accordingly. Maybe they're self-operated, or maybe they're other companies with a narrow focus. Then you write a blog post about how everyone is crazy to use <cloud> since it's so expensive, and you don't know why you ever thought they were a good idea.
- somerando7 5y ago
  Yep, and most likely the service they switched to is running at a loss until they get enough customers, and then will start uping their costs, continuing the cycle (either migrate for cost savings, or stay)!
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- methodin 5y ago
  Indeed. I don't even see this as a bad thing - it means you pick the best option given your shifting criteria which is what we should be doing. Blindly doing one or the other makes no sense. I don't particularly enjoy the blog posts that are hyperbolic (not necessarily this one) - both AWS and other things can both be simultaneously a good choice for any given company.
  - noogle 5y ago
    But moving off of the cloud is not always realistic. If the start-up leveraged cloud-specific services, they are now locked in. If they remained cloud-agnostic, they were under-utilizing the cloud. How many companies actually shift their infra vendor?
0xbadcafebee 5y ago
Bragging about switching to Hetzner always reminds me of my friend bragging about buying a $500 honda civic. What a great deal! He soon had a much larger tool chest and oil-stained jeans, and learned a lot more about cars :)
- duxup 5y ago
  Inevitable conversation: “Why doesn’t everyone do this?” “I did the other thing so I can do … other things.”
- gwern 5y ago
  I think it's the other way around. People like to brag about their complex AWS setup and how easy it is... well, except for this lifecycle policy, and you need to edit this XML, and yeah, this limit on VM types is not documented you have to request it be lifted, and you did remember to whitelist your IP range so you can log in right, and yes I know you'd think you could serve that file but the CORS headers need to be set in the AWS console, and redirects have to be uploaded with a special config option in s3cmd it's not just a list of regexps and... Meanwhile on my Hetzner, I log in, tweak stuff directly, and it works. My static site wound up being much easier and more comprehensible when I dropped all the AWS stuff. I don't miss AWS one bit.
rusteh1 5y ago
I'm not familiar with Hetzner at all. But it seems they are running a single self managed VM to serve these updates globally, and then comparing that to the cost of egress on a globally distributed content delivery network? What am I missing here? This is not the same thing. Nevermind the fact that AWS is an ecosystem with hundreds of products working in tandem to deliver solutions not just EC2.
- StopHammoTime 5y ago
  Yes, but AWS egress on EC2 is still 0.02c outbound from EC2 (4x savings). The egress fees are still egregious via a comparable EC2 instance. Then of course, once you factor in that AWS push "S3 via CloudFront" as the gold standard in static asset hosting it smells even more.
- zwass 5y ago
  I don't think you're missing anything! We didn't need 100% uptime or a globally distributed CDN. What we did need is orders of magnitude cheaper costs. So we moved this particular part of our offering to Hetzner. I think the interest in this comes from the idea of identifying the needs and optimizing appropriately.
Buge 5y ago
> This came out to about a 2x savings over AWS. Is that a typical way to describe cost savings? I would have said 1/2 the cost of AWS. It almost sounds like cloudflare would pay them money (e.g. you go to the store and see something marked 200% off, so you get paid to buy it, like when oil prices went negative). Related: I've always found the 2x, 10x, etc notation confusing. Does a 2x improvement mean a 100% increase (e.g. 10 -> 20) or a 200% increase (e.g. 10 -> 30)? Would someone ever say a 1x improvement or a 0.5x improvement?
- BoorishBears 5y ago
  It's funny how your first paragraph makes it clear you're not confused about this at all. 2x savings means you need to double the new price to get the old 10x savings means multiple new price by 10x to get old 59x savings...multiply by 59.
  - Buge 5y ago
    Yeah, I could guess based on context. I would prefer notation that's clear on its own without needing to look at context. "1/2 the price" is clear on its own. And it still makes me feel nervous that 3x improvement = 200% increase. It seems to me like a big opportunity for misunderstanding.
    - getcrunk 5y ago
      Thank you so much for saying this! It has always bothered me
    - BoorishBears 5y ago
      1/59th the price isn't as clear. If even a person asking how it works knew how it worked, how confusing can it be?
      - Buge 5y ago
        I think 1/59th the price is clearer than 59x cheaper. In 59x, what is the x for? Multiplication? What is being multiplied? "1/59th the price of AWS" is clear because you take the price of AWS and multiply it by 1/59. Probably more clear would be "1.7% the price of AWS". When I think there's an opportunity for misunderstanding, I point it out. I don't think I'm more likely to misunderstand something than the average person, but I am more likely to speak out if I see something potentially confusing. I would be interested in seeing a poll where we ask people to estimate "59x cheaper than $200", vs "1/59th of $200" vs "1.7% of $200". Obviously the last one is easiest to do exactly in your head, but we can still get a fair comparison by just seeing whether people are at least in the neighborhood vs way off. I would also like to see it with 2x, 1/2 and 50%.
rstephenson2 5y ago
I'd be most interested to hear about situations one step up from there, where Hetzner's per-TB-per-month pricing doesn't work out favorably and you want to serve content reasonably quickly anywhere in the world. It seems like you could build out a CDN on OVH using 1-5Gbps unmetered+guaranteed bandwidth and place servers in the US, Europe, and a few PoPs in Asia for relatively cheap, then use GeoDNS for balancing traffic. But it seems like OVH's pricing offerings have been shifting over the last year to remove the "guaranteed bandwidth" in favor of "unmetered bandwidth" (potentially throttled 50%) on more machine types. It would still require monitoring and managing bandwidth saturation per host, and it's unclear how much extra hassle OVH adds. But in theory it seems easier than setting up and managing colos in many countries?
bombcar 5y ago
Hetzner has some strange pathing issues to the US, such that using an EU vpn almost always gets you much faster speeds. I blame level3 as that’s where it seems to go pear-shaped.
StratusBen 5y ago
[Disclaimer: I'm Co-Founder and CEO of https://www.vantage.sh https://www.vantage.sh - a cloud cost platform] On this topic as its relevant, at Vantage we launched an automated cost recommendation that keeps an eye on egress out of Cloudfront and S3 and recommends when it makes financial sense to switch to another provider (in the linked blog post, Cloudflare) https://www.vantage.sh/blog/cloudflare-specific-cost-recommendations-for-amazon-cloudfront-and-amazon-s3-egress https://www.vantage.sh/blog/cloudflare-specific-cost-recomme... -- this has been very popular with current customers/users. We're actually in process of adding a bunch of new infrastructure and service providers and should include Hetzner in our list of recommended providers but thought I'd mention for anyone wanting an automated approach to knowing when you hit the financial tipping point, this is one option.
jiveturkey 5y ago
https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/ https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/ although I hate to shill for Cloudflare, as I believe they are evil, but anyway there you go
- josephcsible 5y ago
  Why do you think Cloudflare is evil? I think they're a big net good, especially in their efforts against censorship and surveillance.
  - jiveturkey 5y ago
    I'm reluctant to get too into it as it's a downvote magnet. This reply already should be legitimately downvoted just for being OT. Yes, they offer a magnificent service. Best of class or nearly so, for all their offerings and a decent free tier to get the mindshare. But: they want to dip their beak into all internet traffic. The power that comes with such concentration is impossible not to corrupt. What efforts against censorship? Like how they (actively) cancelled 8chan and Daily Stormer? I won't go into anti-surveillance much because it's too contentious. Very few recognize or want to acknowledge the downsides of 1.1.1.1. I honestly don't want to get into it more than that in part because I've forgotten more than I used to know about their various business practices. (I used to work near to this space.) I have a vague idea that they have made centralized (power concentrating) choices in some cases, where they could have made decentralized choices, but I can't recall specific products ATM and, well, I'm only willing to invest so much time in this post. By their literal mission "to build a better internet", we can see from those choices that better is in the eye of the beholder. Just as evil has always been as defined by Google. I don't mean that Cloudflare is willfully evil. At the time that I was intensely interested in them and formed this opinion I could find no evidence of willfulness, and their products and their operations have all the good protections. But they do get to define 'better' in their own image and in favor of their own interests. I'm sorry to be so vague.
    - josephcsible 5y ago
      > What efforts against censorship? Their efforts to roll out DNS-over-HTTPS and eSNI/ECH. > Like how they (actively) cancelled 8chan and Daily Stormer? I'll admit that was bad of them, but they're still way less cancel-happy than basically the entire rest of Big Tech.
kaivi 5y ago
Beware that Hetzner is quick at blocking IPs, with zero recourse or explanation. If they receive any kind of abuse report, they instantly put you on a 24h timer, but they won't show you contents of that message. If you do not respond in time, they will simply block the IP. What's strange is that I was using Cloudflare in front of Hetzner, but it seems that Cloudflare is ratting their users out and forwarding any abuse mail to the owners of "cloud protected" IPs, all without any notification or warning. Hetzner then sends you an email like "Please remove <sitename> from our network within the next 24 hours. This site violates 6.2 of Hetzner's terms and conditions.", where site in question is an obvious mirror/search engine of another social network. What's perhaps more irritating is that Hetzner Cloud has a tiny LIFO queue of ipv4 addresses unique per customer, so you will get the same IP as soon as you release one. You can imagine what happens to a Rancher-managed k8s cluster with Hetzner node driver when one of those IPs gets a no-route: it will get stuck trying to re-deploy a failed node. Mine eventually fell apart though because I did not attend to it for a couple of years. I'm now hosting from a proverbial garage (NixOS and cron) but proxying traffic through a cheap cloud VM, which saves me at least $1500/mo.
- mike_d 5y ago
  I've done tons of sketchy shit (security research) from lots of different providers and never seen this type of response. Whatever you (or your customer) were doing likely hit the point where they assumed the police would be by for a chat.
  - dannyw 5y ago
    Absolutely; every host does review abuse complaints because there's a lot of fake garbage out there. For this kind of response, you're probably looking at (1) extremist material or (2) CSAM.
    - mschuster91 5y ago
      > For this kind of response, you're probably looking at (1) extremist material or (2) CSAM. Both of which can be found in copious amounts on Reddit and Twitter, and there are multiple services for these where the description of "search engine / mirror for a social network" applies. Additionally, Hetzner is a German company. Our laws are very strict regarding Nazi content, and absurdly ridiculous when it comes to CSAM - about three quarters of what you can find on fanfiction sites is theoretically illegal here (§184c StGB).
saimiam 5y ago
I saw that the article mentioned maintenance being minimal right now but at some point, you will need to hire an SRE or some such individual to handle just the Hetzner subsystem for you. Is that part of the TCO calculations? E.g., if you’re paying someone $5-7000/month (no idea what an SRE costs) to manage a fleet of say 10 subsystems, their salary should factor into the cost calculations, right?
- noogle 5y ago
  But you also need to hire someone to manage the AWS infrastructure. And the need to use-only-as-needed creates additional burden that doesn't exist with cheaper monthly-paid hardware. The answer might very well be "it will take less time to manage AWS", but it's not clear. Some might need a pay-stack to handle the cloud's pricing.
cosmin800 5y ago
tl;dr the title was enough. I am so surprised by how this somewhat normal post (we got burned on aws cryptic billing model) makes it on the 1st place - is like people discovering warm water. This is not high-tech/rocket technology/science.
ofrzeta 5y ago
It's quite easy when you only need to replace EC2. Since last year Hetzner also has a Loadbalancer service that can be used with VM instances but also in Kubernetes. It's not so easy to replace AWS RDS, though (or other services for that matter but RDS seems to be one of the more basic services).
ofrzeta 5y ago
They did not mention Terraform in the article but it might be of interest for people considering a switch that there's a Terraform provider for hcloud.
neelc 5y ago
I work at Microsoft (not on Azure) and run Tor relays. My Tor Exit hosts are Psychz Networks, Terrahost, and OVH, along with a middle relay on CenturyLink Fiber. Why? Azure egress bandwidth is too expensive for a Tor relay, even for a well-paid software engineer like me. I have ~1.5 Gbps Tor bandwidth. If I were to put that on Azure, I would be paying a mortgage worth of bandwidth fees. Same can apply to AWS and Google Cloud. However, Big Clouds charge more for bandwidth because (a) they're a leader and (b) they have paid peering deals with Big Telecom (e.g. AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, Telefonica, etc.). Smaller hosts like Hetzner don't peer with those ISPs and rely on "transit", but that also means slightly worse performance to Big Telecom. In short, big clouds can use their market power and advanced technology to command a premium, whereas smaller clouds have to win over customers with lower prices to make up. Tor relays are ill-suited for Big Clouds, but then your 5000-node Kubernetes cluster is ill-suited for OVH or Hetzner. I do use the free Azure credit for Tor Bridges, however.
- josephcsible 5y ago
  > However, Big Clouds charge more for bandwidth because [...] they have paid peering deals with Big Telecom (e.g. AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, Telefonica, etc.). Smaller hosts like Hetzner don't peer with those ISPs and rely on "transit" Wait, this seems backwards to me. I'd expect companies that can peer with Big Telecom to charge you less for bandwidth than companies that have to pay for transit. What am I missing?
  - tracker1 5y ago
    They aren't paying more, they're charging more.
  - solarkraft 5y ago
    I'm not sure about the others, but as a Deutsche Telekom customer I have discovered that they actually want to be paid for peering deals through occasionally extremely slow connections.
    - MaKey 5y ago
tudorconstantin 5y ago
Watch out that electricity costs went up significantly in Europe in the past months. I am a happy hetzner customer since 2012 I think. Their server monthly costs were just a bit higher than my electricity bill would've been if I were to keep a machine up 24/7 at home, so I rented a machine from them having the hardware basically for free. Last week I got an email from them saying my server cost would increase from 30eur/month to 48eur/month. I can take afford the increase, but I wonder how many companies with infra bills of tens or hundreds of thousands will be able to afford a 60% increase in hosting costs.
jhoelzel 5y ago
Whenever I see posts like this, I'd like to point out that both is possible at the same time. Full on self hosting your own cloud comes usually with a lot more services than "the" cloud does because thats usually why the hoster is considered "small". In Hetzners case you will for sure at least have to self host a decent RDBMS and it better be replicated, which means more maintenance and servers. But you do not have to put all your eggs into one basket! There are more than enough ways to split the load and you can even add dedicated servers in the mix too! It should not be "yep we are on azure, or yup we are on hetzner" but "my job as an architect is to combine the two for maximum value" ;)
mehukatti 5y ago
A couple of talking points come to mind: The linked blog post mentions October 2021, while in December 2021 AWS lowered pricing for CloudFront where the first terabyte out to internet is now completely free: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/11/aws-price-reduction-data-transfers-internet/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/11/aws-price... For larger use cases most cloud providers have custom or private pricing options available. For example in CloudFront pricing page AWS publicly states that "Custom discounted pricing is available for customers willing to commit to a minimum of 10 TB of data transfer per month for 12 months or longer." I have noted that most of the blog posts like the one linked above talk about migrating workloads around for savings of tens or hundreds of dollars while focusing on low level IaaS (VMs), and completely ignore the benefits of leveraging cloud services, APIs and related software ecosystems instead of DIY.
- kavalg 5y ago
  While I mostly agree with you, you should take into account that not all start ups are venture funded. Sometimes you want to test an idea and you are funding it yourself (spare time and money). Testing an idea is not a one month gig. You often have to be patient and try different things until it works or you are confident you know why it didn't.
sirwitti 5y ago
What's interesting to me is that from my limited experience with cloud services it feels like the technical skills to set up cloud hostings and a good architecture to be just as much work as setting up dedicated servers or even vps. Or maybe being 38 makes me really old in the way I approach things...
- chillfox 5y ago
  It's a different skill set. Cloud feels closer to developer skills, where as your VPS, VM, dedicated servers, are traditional sysadmin skills.
  - capableweb 5y ago
    Funny, I see it the opposite way. Managing VPS, VM and dedicated root servers is something that a developers often have to deal with just at home, doing it with remote servers is just the same skills but applied to bigger servers, remote setting, more instances available than your personal computer, easier to congest bandwidth and so on. If you're a developer you're already a sysadmin, no matter if you use Windows, macOS or Linux. It's just a matter of depth in your sysadmin skill. People who manage huge "cloud" installations feels more like what the traditional sysadmin role was. Everything is so different than your personal setup, you have no use of the same skills outside of that particular provider, and there are many concepts that you have to deal with that you never deal with locally.
  - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
    With cloud, millennials just reinvented the mainframe. Anything new is a well forgotten old.
- kikimora 5y ago
  Configuring cloud is likely more complicated than configuring a few VPS because its configuration interface designed for large scale deployments and corporate/government needs. Cloud scales, not just in terms of compute and storage capacity but it can also address your growing org demands. For example - Protect data flowing thru the wire such that another server sitting on the same wire cannot eavesdrop. - Control access to servers and resources. - Force configuration policies. - Keep audit logs of what people do on your servers in a tamper resistant way. - Have single sign on into multiple apps - So on an so forth. All that can be done by a competent admin/dev/devops but it takes nontrivial amount of time to setup and maintain. Having solutions integrated into your cloud of choice is a huge time saver.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

326 points by zwass 5y ago

> Having heard of Hetzner’s low egress costs (20TB free + €1.19/TB/month), we investigated what it would take to run our own server. My understanding was that they dropped the per-TB billing a few years ago and now it's just uncapped?

menmob 5y ago
Dedicated machines have uncapped bandwidth, VMs get 20TB free.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
  1G/s connected machines have uncapped bandwidth, 10G/s machines have a 20TB cap, then €1 /TB.

zwass 5y ago

tl;dr Cloudflare offered a savings over AWS CloudFront, but we saved multiple orders of magnitude DIYing it on Hetzner. So far ops have not been too painful.

cblconfederate 5y ago
nice, but the article is the opposite of "too long"

lpellegr 5y ago

Great article. I wrote about a similar experience 9 months ago while switching from Google Cloud Storage to Scaleway Object Storage: https://pellegrino.link/2021/05/31/scaleway-object-storage-s3-java-library.html https://pellegrino.link/2021/05/31/scaleway-object-storage-s... Similarly, I saved about x100. For sure, the services do not offer the same level of guarantees and speed but depending on my case it was worth a migration. Looking forward to trying Cloudflare R2 soon!

zwass 5y ago
Thank you for sharing! We are also interested in R2, but it sounded like it would not be available for quite some time when we spoke to Cloudflare.
- ignoramous 5y ago
  Depending on the size of the objects, one could use Workers KV ($5 per 1M writes, $5 per 10M reads, 25M size limit) as a pseudo-R2 store [0] via Workers Unbound (~$1 per 6M requests), especially with the recent optimizations bringing the bills (of Workers Unbound proxying KV) down by 70% [1] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28747798 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28747798 [1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/workers-optimization-reduces-your-bill/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/workers-optimization-reduces-you...
Dave3of5 5y ago
Yeah +1 for scaleway been using them for years and they are great.

stavros 5y ago

This is interesting... Is there some distributed caching server one could use for this, for increased uptime? Basically some CDN.

zwass 5y ago
This isn't a direct answer to your question, but our use-case is not latency sensitive (and not even particularly uptime sensitive). So far we've got near 100% uptime and if we needed more we could put multiple servers behind a load balancer. That wouldn't help much with latency -- for that I'd think you need some geographic distribution -- exactly what a CDN is good for.
- stavros 5y ago
  Ah yep, makes perfect sense.

hardwaresofton 5y ago

One thing Hetzner doesn’t have yet (but it SHOULD!) is Object Storage, and it’s something I’m working on over at NimbusWS[0]. Another awesome thing about Hetzner is that bandwidth internally is free and automatically negotiated (i.e if you send traffic to a Hetzner IP it will flow internally). One of the hardest things is being able to tell the bandwidth usage and when it’s inside/outside Hetzner. [0]: https://nimbusws.com https://nimbusws.com

jopsen 5y ago
Scaleway has object storage: https://www.scaleway.com/en/pricing/ https://www.scaleway.com/en/pricing/
- jamil7 5y ago
  Scaleway has awful customer support, beware.
  - thejosh 5y ago
    Yes, run.
  - smarx007 5y ago
    Everyone has (relatively) poor support if you are a budget customer. Scaleway support replied to all my tickets and was professional. Not a 1 hour response but can’t complain for a €5/mo. Been with them for ca 4 years since the ARM days until recently.
- WaxProlix 5y ago
  Scaleway and Hetzner are cool. What I'd love to see is a lower-cost (if slightly higher-friction?) version of AWS as it was early on. Some sort of analogues for: - S3 - VPC - Compute instances (types don't have to bee too fine grained) - SQS, SNS - Some sort of Dynamo and/or RDS functionality. - Some basic API coordinators, I guess Teraform has providers for lots of stuff these days. Lambda- and fargate-like things would be a plus, but not strictly necessary. I feel like 90% of the projects I've ever built could be easily made and scaled with nothing else. Further features hit diminishing returns really fast, and serve to muddy the waters up around what tooling is best, or even what exists.

iancarroll 5y ago

For those in the Bay Area who are a bit more adventurous, Hurricane Electric charges only $400/mo for a full rack in their Fremont datacenter, along with 1Gbps of bandwidth, and 12A of usable power. It’s totally overkill for the article’s use case, but it enables many cool things that need sustained bandwidth, and has been pretty fun.

cortesoft 5y ago
That is a surprisingly small amount of bandwidth for such a large amount of space. A single machine in the rack could easily saturate the network.
- jcims 5y ago
  Same with 12A of power. It's just the base offering. It's nice to get a full rack though b/c you can be more flexible with organization, have some (physical) storage space for spares, console, accessories, etc.
  - gnu8 5y ago
    If you can get three in a row you can have a place to sleep for $1200/mo.
    - bluedino 5y ago
      You can't sleep standing?
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - Ostrogodsky 5y ago
        Of course, but you have to budget space for your closet
    - jcims 5y ago

mikeryan 5y ago

I feel it’s unwise to simply accept “additional maintenance burden” as a “free” cost unless it’s under an hour or two a month.

zwass 5y ago
Fair enough. So far it's been under an hour or two a month! We'll see how that pans out in the longer term.
Nextgrid 5y ago
The learning curve is definitely different but once that's done, the maintenance is minimal (modern hardware is surprisingly reliable from my experience). Most maintenance you'll be doing is software-level stuff (system updates, etc) you'd also need on a cloud-hosted EC2 or similar.
MrStonedOne 5y ago
It likely is under that threshold. Also it doesn't matter. Cloud vs vps/colo/rented bare metal basically comes down to surplus of cash vs surplus of tech talent. Any small tech focused company is gonna have more of the latter then the former, and in that situation, cloud doesn't make sense when ansible, k8s, and the like exists.
christophilus 5y ago
Security updates are automatic. I haven’t touched my physical servers (not even via ssh) in 6 months. The only reason I did it then was that we moved an app from Node to Go, so I was able to completely remove Node from those servers (which felt great). I think people overestimate how hard it is to run a server.
- daveidol 5y ago
  Semi-unrelated, but how was your experience moving from Node to Go? Any particular reason/requirement that prompted the change?
- quickthrower2 5y ago

endisneigh 5y ago

What’s the best way to use generic compute to create an Serverless functions equivalent? I feel that's the best case for this sort of compute here - well, that and build jobs, heh.

ricktdotorg 5y ago
i also would be very interested in this!

Ecco 5y ago

Could someone explain what the « website assets » limitation of CloudFlare is about?

zwass 5y ago
I can think of two possible reasons: 1) Website assets are generally optimized for size (images, etc.) and so reduce Cloudflare's total cost to service. 2) Cloudflare believes that free tier users who use it for their website assets are more likely to want the other Cloudflare services and therefore convert to paying customers.
anonymoushn 5y ago
For example CloudFlare's free tier is not intended to be free transit or storage for other services that are substantially about selling storage and transit. If you make an image-processing CDN type thing, like imgix, CloudFlare does not intend to subsidize almost all of your costs.

TheIronMark 5y ago

> DIYing it does come with additional maintenance burden, but so far we’ve found this manageable. Tune in next month for their article on how much fun manually scaling everything is.

cpncrunch 5y ago
The reality is that most startups don't scale exponentially unless they are injecting huge amounts of cash into their company (and in that case they can afford AWS). The company in this article just has a single server.
- orasis 5y ago
  However, most services that are around for a long time experience bursty traffic so provisioning is still difficult.
  - cpncrunch 5y ago
    It really depends on a lot of factors such as technology, amount of traffic, etc. My server handles about 200 simultaneous users on a few % of cpu. I think most startups will have a smaller load than this unless they become incredibly successful or pour tons of cash into growth.
  - andai 5y ago
    Fun fact: Hacker News runs on a single core.
    - getcrunk 5y ago
      Sarcasm?
      - andai 5y ago
        "HN's main software runs on a single core", wrote a moderator when I wrote to ask about why rapid (<2s?) subsequent actions were rejected by the server (ie. like a post and then favorite it). This was November 2020 and he mentioned a big overhaul was in the works (of both HN and Arc, the programming language in which it is written). We've seen new features since then, but the throttling is still there so it seems to still be the same situation regarding fundamental infrastructure.

mabbo 5y ago

It's the same story every day, the same pattern. And it's the same because it works. Startup: use <aws|azure|gcp> because it's quick to get started. It's easy to scale it up 100X in 5 minutes for when you make it big. And it provides a long list of easy to use services that are overpriced per use, but which free you to focus on your business rather than complex DevOps. Then once you scale to the point that you're comparing your salaries and your ops cost, you find smaller services to handle the expensive part of your business. Ones that do exactly what you need, not much else, and charge accordingly. Maybe they're self-operated, or maybe they're other companies with a narrow focus. Then you write a blog post about how everyone is crazy to use <cloud> since it's so expensive, and you don't know why you ever thought they were a good idea.

somerando7 5y ago
Yep, and most likely the service they switched to is running at a loss until they get enough customers, and then will start uping their costs, continuing the cycle (either migrate for cost savings, or stay)!
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
methodin 5y ago
Indeed. I don't even see this as a bad thing - it means you pick the best option given your shifting criteria which is what we should be doing. Blindly doing one or the other makes no sense. I don't particularly enjoy the blog posts that are hyperbolic (not necessarily this one) - both AWS and other things can both be simultaneously a good choice for any given company.
- noogle 5y ago
  But moving off of the cloud is not always realistic. If the start-up leveraged cloud-specific services, they are now locked in. If they remained cloud-agnostic, they were under-utilizing the cloud. How many companies actually shift their infra vendor?

0xbadcafebee 5y ago

Bragging about switching to Hetzner always reminds me of my friend bragging about buying a $500 honda civic. What a great deal! He soon had a much larger tool chest and oil-stained jeans, and learned a lot more about cars :)

duxup 5y ago
Inevitable conversation: “Why doesn’t everyone do this?” “I did the other thing so I can do … other things.”
gwern 5y ago
I think it's the other way around. People like to brag about their complex AWS setup and how easy it is... well, except for this lifecycle policy, and you need to edit this XML, and yeah, this limit on VM types is not documented you have to request it be lifted, and you did remember to whitelist your IP range so you can log in right, and yes I know you'd think you could serve that file but the CORS headers need to be set in the AWS console, and redirects have to be uploaded with a special config option in s3cmd it's not just a list of regexps and... Meanwhile on my Hetzner, I log in, tweak stuff directly, and it works. My static site wound up being much easier and more comprehensible when I dropped all the AWS stuff. I don't miss AWS one bit.

rusteh1 5y ago

I'm not familiar with Hetzner at all. But it seems they are running a single self managed VM to serve these updates globally, and then comparing that to the cost of egress on a globally distributed content delivery network? What am I missing here? This is not the same thing. Nevermind the fact that AWS is an ecosystem with hundreds of products working in tandem to deliver solutions not just EC2.

StopHammoTime 5y ago
Yes, but AWS egress on EC2 is still 0.02c outbound from EC2 (4x savings). The egress fees are still egregious via a comparable EC2 instance. Then of course, once you factor in that AWS push "S3 via CloudFront" as the gold standard in static asset hosting it smells even more.
zwass 5y ago
I don't think you're missing anything! We didn't need 100% uptime or a globally distributed CDN. What we did need is orders of magnitude cheaper costs. So we moved this particular part of our offering to Hetzner. I think the interest in this comes from the idea of identifying the needs and optimizing appropriately.

Buge 5y ago

> This came out to about a 2x savings over AWS. Is that a typical way to describe cost savings? I would have said 1/2 the cost of AWS. It almost sounds like cloudflare would pay them money (e.g. you go to the store and see something marked 200% off, so you get paid to buy it, like when oil prices went negative). Related: I've always found the 2x, 10x, etc notation confusing. Does a 2x improvement mean a 100% increase (e.g. 10 -> 20) or a 200% increase (e.g. 10 -> 30)? Would someone ever say a 1x improvement or a 0.5x improvement?

BoorishBears 5y ago
It's funny how your first paragraph makes it clear you're not confused about this at all. 2x savings means you need to double the new price to get the old 10x savings means multiple new price by 10x to get old 59x savings...multiply by 59.
- Buge 5y ago
  Yeah, I could guess based on context. I would prefer notation that's clear on its own without needing to look at context. "1/2 the price" is clear on its own. And it still makes me feel nervous that 3x improvement = 200% increase. It seems to me like a big opportunity for misunderstanding.
  - getcrunk 5y ago
    Thank you so much for saying this! It has always bothered me
  - BoorishBears 5y ago
    1/59th the price isn't as clear. If even a person asking how it works knew how it worked, how confusing can it be?
    - Buge 5y ago
      I think 1/59th the price is clearer than 59x cheaper. In 59x, what is the x for? Multiplication? What is being multiplied? "1/59th the price of AWS" is clear because you take the price of AWS and multiply it by 1/59. Probably more clear would be "1.7% the price of AWS". When I think there's an opportunity for misunderstanding, I point it out. I don't think I'm more likely to misunderstand something than the average person, but I am more likely to speak out if I see something potentially confusing. I would be interested in seeing a poll where we ask people to estimate "59x cheaper than $200", vs "1/59th of $200" vs "1.7% of $200". Obviously the last one is easiest to do exactly in your head, but we can still get a fair comparison by just seeing whether people are at least in the neighborhood vs way off. I would also like to see it with 2x, 1/2 and 50%.

rstephenson2 5y ago

I'd be most interested to hear about situations one step up from there, where Hetzner's per-TB-per-month pricing doesn't work out favorably and you want to serve content reasonably quickly anywhere in the world. It seems like you could build out a CDN on OVH using 1-5Gbps unmetered+guaranteed bandwidth and place servers in the US, Europe, and a few PoPs in Asia for relatively cheap, then use GeoDNS for balancing traffic. But it seems like OVH's pricing offerings have been shifting over the last year to remove the "guaranteed bandwidth" in favor of "unmetered bandwidth" (potentially throttled 50%) on more machine types. It would still require monitoring and managing bandwidth saturation per host, and it's unclear how much extra hassle OVH adds. But in theory it seems easier than setting up and managing colos in many countries?

bombcar 5y ago

Hetzner has some strange pathing issues to the US, such that using an EU vpn almost always gets you much faster speeds. I blame level3 as that’s where it seems to go pear-shaped.

StratusBen 5y ago

[Disclaimer: I'm Co-Founder and CEO of https://www.vantage.sh https://www.vantage.sh - a cloud cost platform] On this topic as its relevant, at Vantage we launched an automated cost recommendation that keeps an eye on egress out of Cloudfront and S3 and recommends when it makes financial sense to switch to another provider (in the linked blog post, Cloudflare) https://www.vantage.sh/blog/cloudflare-specific-cost-recommendations-for-amazon-cloudfront-and-amazon-s3-egress https://www.vantage.sh/blog/cloudflare-specific-cost-recomme... -- this has been very popular with current customers/users. We're actually in process of adding a bunch of new infrastructure and service providers and should include Hetzner in our list of recommended providers but thought I'd mention for anyone wanting an automated approach to knowing when you hit the financial tipping point, this is one option.

jiveturkey 5y ago

https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/ https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/ although I hate to shill for Cloudflare, as I believe they are evil, but anyway there you go

josephcsible 5y ago
Why do you think Cloudflare is evil? I think they're a big net good, especially in their efforts against censorship and surveillance.
- jiveturkey 5y ago
  I'm reluctant to get too into it as it's a downvote magnet. This reply already should be legitimately downvoted just for being OT. Yes, they offer a magnificent service. Best of class or nearly so, for all their offerings and a decent free tier to get the mindshare. But: they want to dip their beak into all internet traffic. The power that comes with such concentration is impossible not to corrupt. What efforts against censorship? Like how they (actively) cancelled 8chan and Daily Stormer? I won't go into anti-surveillance much because it's too contentious. Very few recognize or want to acknowledge the downsides of 1.1.1.1. I honestly don't want to get into it more than that in part because I've forgotten more than I used to know about their various business practices. (I used to work near to this space.) I have a vague idea that they have made centralized (power concentrating) choices in some cases, where they could have made decentralized choices, but I can't recall specific products ATM and, well, I'm only willing to invest so much time in this post. By their literal mission "to build a better internet", we can see from those choices that better is in the eye of the beholder. Just as evil has always been as defined by Google. I don't mean that Cloudflare is willfully evil. At the time that I was intensely interested in them and formed this opinion I could find no evidence of willfulness, and their products and their operations have all the good protections. But they do get to define 'better' in their own image and in favor of their own interests. I'm sorry to be so vague.
  - josephcsible 5y ago
    > What efforts against censorship? Their efforts to roll out DNS-over-HTTPS and eSNI/ECH. > Like how they (actively) cancelled 8chan and Daily Stormer? I'll admit that was bad of them, but they're still way less cancel-happy than basically the entire rest of Big Tech.

kaivi 5y ago

Beware that Hetzner is quick at blocking IPs, with zero recourse or explanation. If they receive any kind of abuse report, they instantly put you on a 24h timer, but they won't show you contents of that message. If you do not respond in time, they will simply block the IP. What's strange is that I was using Cloudflare in front of Hetzner, but it seems that Cloudflare is ratting their users out and forwarding any abuse mail to the owners of "cloud protected" IPs, all without any notification or warning. Hetzner then sends you an email like "Please remove <sitename> from our network within the next 24 hours. This site violates 6.2 of Hetzner's terms and conditions.", where site in question is an obvious mirror/search engine of another social network. What's perhaps more irritating is that Hetzner Cloud has a tiny LIFO queue of ipv4 addresses unique per customer, so you will get the same IP as soon as you release one. You can imagine what happens to a Rancher-managed k8s cluster with Hetzner node driver when one of those IPs gets a no-route: it will get stuck trying to re-deploy a failed node. Mine eventually fell apart though because I did not attend to it for a couple of years. I'm now hosting from a proverbial garage (NixOS and cron) but proxying traffic through a cheap cloud VM, which saves me at least $1500/mo.

mike_d 5y ago
I've done tons of sketchy shit (security research) from lots of different providers and never seen this type of response. Whatever you (or your customer) were doing likely hit the point where they assumed the police would be by for a chat.
- dannyw 5y ago
  Absolutely; every host does review abuse complaints because there's a lot of fake garbage out there. For this kind of response, you're probably looking at (1) extremist material or (2) CSAM.
  - mschuster91 5y ago
    > For this kind of response, you're probably looking at (1) extremist material or (2) CSAM. Both of which can be found in copious amounts on Reddit and Twitter, and there are multiple services for these where the description of "search engine / mirror for a social network" applies. Additionally, Hetzner is a German company. Our laws are very strict regarding Nazi content, and absurdly ridiculous when it comes to CSAM - about three quarters of what you can find on fanfiction sites is theoretically illegal here (§184c StGB).

saimiam 5y ago

I saw that the article mentioned maintenance being minimal right now but at some point, you will need to hire an SRE or some such individual to handle just the Hetzner subsystem for you. Is that part of the TCO calculations? E.g., if you’re paying someone $5-7000/month (no idea what an SRE costs) to manage a fleet of say 10 subsystems, their salary should factor into the cost calculations, right?

noogle 5y ago
But you also need to hire someone to manage the AWS infrastructure. And the need to use-only-as-needed creates additional burden that doesn't exist with cheaper monthly-paid hardware. The answer might very well be "it will take less time to manage AWS", but it's not clear. Some might need a pay-stack to handle the cloud's pricing.

cosmin800 5y ago

tl;dr the title was enough. I am so surprised by how this somewhat normal post (we got burned on aws cryptic billing model) makes it on the 1st place - is like people discovering warm water. This is not high-tech/rocket technology/science.

ofrzeta 5y ago

It's quite easy when you only need to replace EC2. Since last year Hetzner also has a Loadbalancer service that can be used with VM instances but also in Kubernetes. It's not so easy to replace AWS RDS, though (or other services for that matter but RDS seems to be one of the more basic services).

ofrzeta 5y ago

They did not mention Terraform in the article but it might be of interest for people considering a switch that there's a Terraform provider for hcloud.

neelc 5y ago

I work at Microsoft (not on Azure) and run Tor relays. My Tor Exit hosts are Psychz Networks, Terrahost, and OVH, along with a middle relay on CenturyLink Fiber. Why? Azure egress bandwidth is too expensive for a Tor relay, even for a well-paid software engineer like me. I have ~1.5 Gbps Tor bandwidth. If I were to put that on Azure, I would be paying a mortgage worth of bandwidth fees. Same can apply to AWS and Google Cloud. However, Big Clouds charge more for bandwidth because (a) they're a leader and (b) they have paid peering deals with Big Telecom (e.g. AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, Telefonica, etc.). Smaller hosts like Hetzner don't peer with those ISPs and rely on "transit", but that also means slightly worse performance to Big Telecom. In short, big clouds can use their market power and advanced technology to command a premium, whereas smaller clouds have to win over customers with lower prices to make up. Tor relays are ill-suited for Big Clouds, but then your 5000-node Kubernetes cluster is ill-suited for OVH or Hetzner. I do use the free Azure credit for Tor Bridges, however.

josephcsible 5y ago
> However, Big Clouds charge more for bandwidth because [...] they have paid peering deals with Big Telecom (e.g. AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, Telefonica, etc.). Smaller hosts like Hetzner don't peer with those ISPs and rely on "transit" Wait, this seems backwards to me. I'd expect companies that can peer with Big Telecom to charge you less for bandwidth than companies that have to pay for transit. What am I missing?
- tracker1 5y ago
  They aren't paying more, they're charging more.
- solarkraft 5y ago
  I'm not sure about the others, but as a Deutsche Telekom customer I have discovered that they actually want to be paid for peering deals through occasionally extremely slow connections.
  - MaKey 5y ago

tudorconstantin 5y ago

Watch out that electricity costs went up significantly in Europe in the past months. I am a happy hetzner customer since 2012 I think. Their server monthly costs were just a bit higher than my electricity bill would've been if I were to keep a machine up 24/7 at home, so I rented a machine from them having the hardware basically for free. Last week I got an email from them saying my server cost would increase from 30eur/month to 48eur/month. I can take afford the increase, but I wonder how many companies with infra bills of tens or hundreds of thousands will be able to afford a 60% increase in hosting costs.

jhoelzel 5y ago

Whenever I see posts like this, I'd like to point out that both is possible at the same time. Full on self hosting your own cloud comes usually with a lot more services than "the" cloud does because thats usually why the hoster is considered "small". In Hetzners case you will for sure at least have to self host a decent RDBMS and it better be replicated, which means more maintenance and servers. But you do not have to put all your eggs into one basket! There are more than enough ways to split the load and you can even add dedicated servers in the mix too! It should not be "yep we are on azure, or yup we are on hetzner" but "my job as an architect is to combine the two for maximum value" ;)

mehukatti 5y ago

A couple of talking points come to mind: The linked blog post mentions October 2021, while in December 2021 AWS lowered pricing for CloudFront where the first terabyte out to internet is now completely free: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/11/aws-price-reduction-data-transfers-internet/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/11/aws-price... For larger use cases most cloud providers have custom or private pricing options available. For example in CloudFront pricing page AWS publicly states that "Custom discounted pricing is available for customers willing to commit to a minimum of 10 TB of data transfer per month for 12 months or longer." I have noted that most of the blog posts like the one linked above talk about migrating workloads around for savings of tens or hundreds of dollars while focusing on low level IaaS (VMs), and completely ignore the benefits of leveraging cloud services, APIs and related software ecosystems instead of DIY.

kavalg 5y ago
While I mostly agree with you, you should take into account that not all start ups are venture funded. Sometimes you want to test an idea and you are funding it yourself (spare time and money). Testing an idea is not a one month gig. You often have to be patient and try different things until it works or you are confident you know why it didn't.

sirwitti 5y ago

What's interesting to me is that from my limited experience with cloud services it feels like the technical skills to set up cloud hostings and a good architecture to be just as much work as setting up dedicated servers or even vps. Or maybe being 38 makes me really old in the way I approach things...

chillfox 5y ago
It's a different skill set. Cloud feels closer to developer skills, where as your VPS, VM, dedicated servers, are traditional sysadmin skills.
- capableweb 5y ago
  Funny, I see it the opposite way. Managing VPS, VM and dedicated root servers is something that a developers often have to deal with just at home, doing it with remote servers is just the same skills but applied to bigger servers, remote setting, more instances available than your personal computer, easier to congest bandwidth and so on. If you're a developer you're already a sysadmin, no matter if you use Windows, macOS or Linux. It's just a matter of depth in your sysadmin skill. People who manage huge "cloud" installations feels more like what the traditional sysadmin role was. Everything is so different than your personal setup, you have no use of the same skills outside of that particular provider, and there are many concepts that you have to deal with that you never deal with locally.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
  With cloud, millennials just reinvented the mainframe. Anything new is a well forgotten old.
kikimora 5y ago
Configuring cloud is likely more complicated than configuring a few VPS because its configuration interface designed for large scale deployments and corporate/government needs. Cloud scales, not just in terms of compute and storage capacity but it can also address your growing org demands. For example - Protect data flowing thru the wire such that another server sitting on the same wire cannot eavesdrop. - Control access to servers and resources. - Force configuration policies. - Keep audit logs of what people do on your servers in a tamper resistant way. - Have single sign on into multiple apps - So on an so forth. All that can be done by a competent admin/dev/devops but it takes nontrivial amount of time to setup and maintain. Having solutions integrated into your cloud of choice is a huge time saver.

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