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Thanks for the response! I gotta disagree with you though on cost. You can get a beefy refurbished dual Xeon blade for a couple hundred bucks. Rack space where

by rank0 5y ago

Thanks for the response! I gotta disagree with you though on cost. You can get a beefy refurbished dual Xeon blade for a couple hundred bucks. Rack space where I live is like $50/month for 1U and gets much cheaper/machine as you scale up. $50 on aws will get me maybe 1 medium ec2 instance and an s3 bucket. With a used blade I get 20x the compute for the same price.

dangus 5y ago
You're overestimating AWS/cloud costs by a decent amount. t3a.medium is under $30/month and that price only goes down when you reserve for the year. Save even more if you can run your service on ARM/Gravitron. A VPS service like Linode will have even better pricing than AWS. Driving over to a data center isn't free (time and cost), either. Those used Xeon blades are cheap for good reason – the companies that originally owned them consider them EOL. There's "no such thing" as dealing with hardware failure (except for occasional stop/starts) in the cloud.
- rank0 5y ago
  You’re right about the time not being free and certainly hardware failure. Although HW is way more reliable than people let on. But aws is extremely expensive per unit of raw compute performance. Obviously I concede that the stability and availability is unmatched compared to DIY solutions. For my specific workload I need lots of memory and cpu cores. (Lots meaning my single 32c/64t 32Gb Xeon tower in my home). I almost fully utilize my resources and STIL need to pay aws for storage/tunneling/DNS/etc. Consuming equivalent compute in aws would be hundreds of dollars per month. Hybrid is just my preference!
eddieroger 5y ago
You're quite welcome. I'm not trying to dissuade you, just provide a point of view I've got from having felt the same way. I'm definitely not comparing to AWS, because yeah those can get super expensive, super fast. What you're paying for with AWS is Amazon-tier stability (whatever that's worth these days), but the difference in uptime between them and a Linode is more than fine for my needs. With your $50/mo, make sure that includes power - Xeons eat watts. Also, be sure to compare apples-to-apples on bandwidth. By comparison, Linode's dedicated CPU plan (not shared, closer to bare metal, but still not) starts at $30 for 2 CPUs and 4GB of RAM and 4TB of transfer, and they'll take care of keeping you on the latest hardware. Again, I don't want to dissuade you, because colo is fun and it's cool to think about your own box out in the world. If anything, I'm envious of how easy it is nowadays compared to when I drove 3 hours to South Bend, Indiana to colo a box of my own, or the first time I needed to engage remote hands because the box got in an irreparable state.

by rank0 5y ago

dangus 5y ago

You're overestimating AWS/cloud costs by a decent amount. t3a.medium is under $30/month and that price only goes down when you reserve for the year. Save even more if you can run your service on ARM/Gravitron. A VPS service like Linode will have even better pricing than AWS. Driving over to a data center isn't free (time and cost), either. Those used Xeon blades are cheap for good reason – the companies that originally owned them consider them EOL. There's "no such thing" as dealing with hardware failure (except for occasional stop/starts) in the cloud.

rank0 5y ago
You’re right about the time not being free and certainly hardware failure. Although HW is way more reliable than people let on. But aws is extremely expensive per unit of raw compute performance. Obviously I concede that the stability and availability is unmatched compared to DIY solutions. For my specific workload I need lots of memory and cpu cores. (Lots meaning my single 32c/64t 32Gb Xeon tower in my home). I almost fully utilize my resources and STIL need to pay aws for storage/tunneling/DNS/etc. Consuming equivalent compute in aws would be hundreds of dollars per month. Hybrid is just my preference!

eddieroger 5y ago

You're quite welcome. I'm not trying to dissuade you, just provide a point of view I've got from having felt the same way. I'm definitely not comparing to AWS, because yeah those can get super expensive, super fast. What you're paying for with AWS is Amazon-tier stability (whatever that's worth these days), but the difference in uptime between them and a Linode is more than fine for my needs. With your $50/mo, make sure that includes power - Xeons eat watts. Also, be sure to compare apples-to-apples on bandwidth. By comparison, Linode's dedicated CPU plan (not shared, closer to bare metal, but still not) starts at $30 for 2 CPUs and 4GB of RAM and 4TB of transfer, and they'll take care of keeping you on the latest hardware. Again, I don't want to dissuade you, because colo is fun and it's cool to think about your own box out in the world. If anything, I'm envious of how easy it is nowadays compared to when I drove 3 hours to South Bend, Indiana to colo a box of my own, or the first time I needed to engage remote hands because the box got in an irreparable state.