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Several of my real, profitable business customers are running $200-$300/mo AWS bills. That includes multiple virtual servers, hosted RDBMS, load balancers, mult

Several of my real, profitable business customers are running $200-$300/mo AWS bills. That includes multiple virtual servers, hosted RDBMS, load balancers, multi-region redundancy, etc. If AWS is costing thousands a month the company is either big enough to need that level of infrastructure, or doesn’t know how to manage their cloud resources. As a freelance system admin I see over-provisioned services and extras added on all the time, doubling or tripling AWS bills for no reason other than ignorance and neglect. I see software stacks that are such pigs they need huge servers to put a simple web page together. Companies should focus on their core products, and that’s even more true for startups that have less cash. Some of them I’ve worked at are using Docker and k8s and all kinds of random crap they don’t need, presumably chosen because it’s cool or some prima donna engineer had to get their way.

bigiain 5y ago
> Several of my real, profitable business customers are running $200-$300/mo AWS bills. That includes multiple virtual servers, hosted RDBMS, load balancers, multi-region redundancy, etc. Yep, 100% My "default answer" to "how much will hosting cost?" is "Starts at about $200/month" - which means ELB + 2xEC2 t3.medium + RDS MultiAZ MySQL/Aurora db.t3.medium, and single digit dollars per month for Route53 DNS, a bit of S3, a bit of CloudFront, a bit of CloudWatch, some SNS email, stuff like that. I have two clients turning over on the order of a million bucks a month on exactly that platform. We guarantee them 99.9% uptime, internally we aim for 99.99% and mostly achieve that. $200 is a good price point for me, it weeds out the sort of client who isn't serious "But I can get a GoDaddy cPanel account for $15/month!", 2while at the same time allowing me to deploy something I'm not _too_ scared to be the guy who gets called if it goes down (inevitably at 2am or on my birthday weekend.) Obviously if someone comes to us with "big data" or "video streaming", or "machine learning" projects, that answer doesn't apply. But I've deployed 100s of websites, web apps, and mobile app backends for that ~$200/month, and realistically maybe 1 or 2% of them ever reach enough users to outgrow that significantly. And only one of those has ever scaled up enough that we had serious discussions about whether large 1yr reserved spot fleets or switching to dedicated hosting was the right way forward.

bigiain 5y ago

> Several of my real, profitable business customers are running $200-$300/mo AWS bills. That includes multiple virtual servers, hosted RDBMS, load balancers, multi-region redundancy, etc. Yep, 100% My "default answer" to "how much will hosting cost?" is "Starts at about $200/month" - which means ELB + 2xEC2 t3.medium + RDS MultiAZ MySQL/Aurora db.t3.medium, and single digit dollars per month for Route53 DNS, a bit of S3, a bit of CloudFront, a bit of CloudWatch, some SNS email, stuff like that. I have two clients turning over on the order of a million bucks a month on exactly that platform. We guarantee them 99.9% uptime, internally we aim for 99.99% and mostly achieve that. $200 is a good price point for me, it weeds out the sort of client who isn't serious "But I can get a GoDaddy cPanel account for $15/month!", 2while at the same time allowing me to deploy something I'm not _too_ scared to be the guy who gets called if it goes down (inevitably at 2am or on my birthday weekend.) Obviously if someone comes to us with "big data" or "video streaming", or "machine learning" projects, that answer doesn't apply. But I've deployed 100s of websites, web apps, and mobile app backends for that ~$200/month, and realistically maybe 1 or 2% of them ever reach enough users to outgrow that significantly. And only one of those has ever scaled up enough that we had serious discussions about whether large 1yr reserved spot fleets or switching to dedicated hosting was the right way forward.