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Dumb question. I’m building little social apps, and I’m hosting stuff in GCP or AWS. I have a few old computers that are still kinda beefy (quad cores and a 6-

Dumb question. I’m building little social apps, and I’m hosting stuff in GCP or AWS. I have a few old computers that are still kinda beefy (quad cores and a 6-core, 16+ Gb ram, some old but still working 3TB hdd). Would it be stupid to run some of my code and data on these? Not everything I have needs to be geographically close to users or something like that, such as a mass notifier service that runs every so often. For example I’ve got a few auxiliary services that I’m sure I could run just fine off these machines, but I chose the cloud because it’s what I’m used to from work.. I have a fiber connection at home and I’m anyway powering my laptops and other electronics 24/7.. Obviously not a bigger business like your use case but I’m just curious. Some services cost quite a bit and I feel like I have better hardware for some things (non database) than what I pay for.

comprev 5y ago
I would recommend plugging the hardware into power measuring units before the wall sockets to give you an estimated running cost. Depending on where you are in the world electricity can be crazy expensive. The cost of purchasing a lower power SBC (x86, ARM) might be very quickly offset. A RaspberryPi can handle a surprising amount, especially the 4/8GB models. The trick is using low resource software.
q1w2 5y ago
You aren't really paying for computing power and storage - you are paying for power/network/facility/server redundancy and availability. We host out own servers, and the bulk of the time is ensuring that the power doesn't go out, that there is a backup internet connection, that the HDs are on RAID, that the server has a backup server available (and the router, and the switch, and the NICs), and that the management network is available, and that the location has proper security monitoring, and that the offsite backup happens nightly, and that we have an employee that knows how to do all of the above... All of that is time consuming and expensive. ...BUT, some people/some companies actually enjoy that sort of thing, in which case, it can work out financially - though often you're sacrificing one of the 9's in your 99.99% uptime/reliability.
- horsawlarway 5y ago
  In almost all cases - you won't actually get 99.99% uptime from your cloud provider anyways. That's around an hour of downtime every year. A much more reasonable estimate is 99.9% - or approx 9 hours, unless you're doing serious planning and spending to account for outages. Hell - the Dec 7th 2021 outage for AWS was nearly 10 hours alone. On your own, 99% is probably a reasonable prediction (roughly 3.5 days), and I think people vastly over-estimate how much small amounts of downtime actually matter for lots of services.
horsawlarway 5y ago
If you're already paying for business internet in the location you have, and your power costs are reasonable, and you don't mind possible downtime - I'd vote go for it. Honestly - Most cloud services are exorbitantly over-priced. There's a reason AWS is ~15% of amazon's total revenue, and Azure now pulls in more revenue than any other MS product. I throw old machines into a micro-k8s cluster. It costs me literally pennies on the dollar for much better computing hardware compared to a vps.
aetherspawn 5y ago
Well, to host anything serious, you’d have to have the right infra. Like a good edge router, redundant power supplies, RAID arrays, a backup mechanism, and a very good upload connection (ie 500mbit). By the time you setup all that, you may as well be using new hardware to make the investment worth it.

comprev 5y ago

I would recommend plugging the hardware into power measuring units before the wall sockets to give you an estimated running cost. Depending on where you are in the world electricity can be crazy expensive. The cost of purchasing a lower power SBC (x86, ARM) might be very quickly offset. A RaspberryPi can handle a surprising amount, especially the 4/8GB models. The trick is using low resource software.

q1w2 5y ago

You aren't really paying for computing power and storage - you are paying for power/network/facility/server redundancy and availability. We host out own servers, and the bulk of the time is ensuring that the power doesn't go out, that there is a backup internet connection, that the HDs are on RAID, that the server has a backup server available (and the router, and the switch, and the NICs), and that the management network is available, and that the location has proper security monitoring, and that the offsite backup happens nightly, and that we have an employee that knows how to do all of the above... All of that is time consuming and expensive. ...BUT, some people/some companies actually enjoy that sort of thing, in which case, it can work out financially - though often you're sacrificing one of the 9's in your 99.99% uptime/reliability.

horsawlarway 5y ago
In almost all cases - you won't actually get 99.99% uptime from your cloud provider anyways. That's around an hour of downtime every year. A much more reasonable estimate is 99.9% - or approx 9 hours, unless you're doing serious planning and spending to account for outages. Hell - the Dec 7th 2021 outage for AWS was nearly 10 hours alone. On your own, 99% is probably a reasonable prediction (roughly 3.5 days), and I think people vastly over-estimate how much small amounts of downtime actually matter for lots of services.

horsawlarway 5y ago

If you're already paying for business internet in the location you have, and your power costs are reasonable, and you don't mind possible downtime - I'd vote go for it. Honestly - Most cloud services are exorbitantly over-priced. There's a reason AWS is ~15% of amazon's total revenue, and Azure now pulls in more revenue than any other MS product. I throw old machines into a micro-k8s cluster. It costs me literally pennies on the dollar for much better computing hardware compared to a vps.

aetherspawn 5y ago

Well, to host anything serious, you’d have to have the right infra. Like a good edge router, redundant power supplies, RAID arrays, a backup mechanism, and a very good upload connection (ie 500mbit). By the time you setup all that, you may as well be using new hardware to make the investment worth it.