5 ms·

Why? Running HN can’t be that expensive, no?

by didip 4y ago

Amfy 4y ago
i think (hope) they take pride in hosting this off any of the big clouds.
kortilla 4y ago
Running on AWS is stupid if you have predictable traffic patterns and don’t need massive scale at the click of a button. It’s like renting an office in downtown Manhattan that you only use to receive mail.
- rozenmd 4y ago
  This - serverless bills are astronomical for consistent traffic, even EC2 charges a premium over regular hosting.
  - anovikov 4y ago
    "Premium" is a gross understatement. Depending on traffic pattern and whether app is traffic-heavy or CPU-heavy, it can be from 5x to over 100x more expensive.
    - GekkePrutser 4y ago
      Ironically this is exactly how we use AWS at work. Some exec decided we must be modern and all cloud. So they closed our datacenters and moved everything to AWS as-is. Including the process to request new "servers" with 10 tabs of complex Excel forms. They just replaced the rack location tab with one about AWS regions lol. It's as static as it can be. We even have the old lead-time for hardware emulated in the cloud now because of the complex approval process taking up similar time. When you take the agile and auto scaling out of the cloud you just end up paying more. But I'm done telling them they're holding it wrong... Nobody wants to know. I hope being modern was worth it. /s
      - anovikov 4y ago
        I had a terrible case of a client spending $6000 per month on a visibly innocent things and refused to move it into dedicated because he could not believe it can bring any savings because "clouds are cheap". Until i just did it at my own expense because with my retainer, a server cost me something like 1.5-2 hours of work per month equivalent. By the way, it's only in the US. In Europe, people are a lot less zombified and susceptible to advertisement/brand image.
      - alecco 4y ago
        > Some exec decided we must be modern and all cloud. And now this exec has this "success story" in his CV and either got a promotion or jumped ship to a better role at another company. It's a tried and true strategy for the ridiculous corporate rat race.
      - warrenm 4y ago
        >They just replaced the rack location tab with one about AWS regions lol As a first swipe ... this is smart - stepping your way into change is often better than one swell foop However, if you never revisit it / plan to improve and do things The New Way(tm), it's stupid Of course, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, Amazon, etc aren't going to do you any favors and show you how to use cloud computing more effectively than dedicated hardware unless you ask them to: they're just providing a service; if you want to pay them $100,000 for something you could do for $1750...who are they to argue?
        GekkePrutser 4y ago
        I agree it would be a good stepping stone. But it doesn't seem like we are stepping anywhere. For example, if there was a clear vision to a real cloud-based company, I would have at least made facilities to to do new things The New Way rather than forcing everything to be the old way. Which is what they're doing. I needed a beefy server do run a big datacrunch periodically, using only minimal software which I can easily autodeploy for every crunch, run it a few hours and kill it till the next time. Sounds like a great option to use cloud, right? Kubernetes would be a bit heavy for this but I could totally ansible this. However there seems to be no way in our org to get a server I can simply spin up when I need it. It needs to be requested in advance in threefold, internal billing agreed etc, and even if I turn it off we'll still be billed for it because I can't destroy it. Destroying and spinning up a new one would mean going through the entire rigmarole again :P The funny thing is, we always do this. By the time we actually go full-on cloud, the world will already have moved on and be on the next great thing, and our neat cloud setup will be all deprecated tech.
- dotancohen 4y ago
  I disagree. I use my AWS EC2 instance as a VPS. For the money I get terrific customer support, access and integration with a tons of other useful services (RDS, S3), shared billing with my Glacier backups, and experience with a technology that employers value. I'm very happy, especially with the customer service.
  - winrid 4y ago
    Many other providers offer the useful services you'd ever need for a smaller company (Linode for example also offers managed databases and object stores) at a fraction of the cost.
  - nimchimpsky 4y ago
    This isn't really a debate is it ? You like it for reasons other than value. OK, but its more expensive than other vps providers. Customer service : if you need to use cusomter service something has gone wrong, and I literally move provider.
  - 3np 4y ago
    You probably also don't have the amount of egress traffic that HN does.
    - dotancohen 4y ago
      Yes, I'm sure that for HN bandwidth is one of the most important factors. For myself it's almost an afterthought. And bandwidth is a critical fulcrum for cloud pricing comparisons.
    - warrenm 4y ago
      HN can't have that much egress traffic Even if you have 100,000 simultaneous users egressing 10k/minute (which seem implausibly high, but usable for a quick approximation), you're only looking at 40 TB/mo And that has to be off by at least an order of magnitude (if not 2 or three) There's no reason, from a bandwidth perspective, you can't host HN on $100 worth of DO droplets and some Object storage/hosted db If HN cost even $500/mo in hosting, I'd be quite surprised
- blahyawnblah 4y ago
  You can lease capacity for significant savings.
- carlsborg 4y ago
  Consider the use case of the enterprise and larger scaled out services. Very few VPS providers will give you guarantees on isolated data centers in each region (availability zones) along with the huge list of compliance programs AWS is certified for. On top of that servers are only a small piece of the AWS universe. Application services (Storage, managed replicated DBs across AZs, managed APIs, streaming, IoT, CDN, identity management...) , and serverless containers and functions are mostly unavailable on small VPS providers. As a solo developer, you don't encounter problems of scaling your engineering team and hiring devops engineers because you are doing everything yourself. The moment you have to hire expensive developers/devops all this starts making sense. But even for solo/smaller accounts, many people are using AWS as a jump host with a programmable whitelist to reach their VPS boxes. Why? Because AWS security is likely best in the world - they spend massive amounts of money on this and many banks and even government services run on them. (And even if you did us it only to scale servers, you don't need to click a button :) AWS autoscaling is finely programmable on all kind of application metrics even custom ones. Or by time of day: many teams routinely scale down their UAT and DEV clusters at night and weekends to zero with an autoscaling rule, more than halving server costs.)
- starfallg 4y ago
  Or running your business at WeWork locations. Enterprise public cloud like AWS really doesn't make financial sense for most large enterprises or small organisations. If you have enough scale there's no need to pay the premium. If you don't need the flexibility you don't need to pay the premium. Only those in are stuck in the middle or have use cases that need extreme 'elasticitiy' or 'agility' really benefit from using this model.
- leoedin 4y ago
  I agree with your point about AWS - but interestingly there's plenty of "prestige" businesses (finance, law) that rent desirable office space solely to get the address, and do most of their back office stuff elsewhere.
- AnonC 4y ago
  Anyone with somewhat predictable load patterns who’s using the cloud and expects to stay around for a few years should switch to “reserved instances” to reduce costs. It’d be a very poorly thought out implementation that doesn’t consider reserved instances. Reserved instances may or may not be competitive with other providers. But they’d check the CTO’s or CIO’s lists on “we’re on the cloud” and save some money.
  - qeternity 4y ago
    Reserved instances are still incredibly expensive compared to bare metal AND require long term commits which bare metal typically doesn’t.
    - Uw7yTcf36gTc 4y ago
      AWS LightSail is fairly cheap and reserved.

Why? Running HN can’t be that expensive, no?

by didip 4y ago

Why? Running HN can’t be that expensive, no?

Amfy 4y ago

i think (hope) they take pride in hosting this off any of the big clouds.

kortilla 4y ago

Running on AWS is stupid if you have predictable traffic patterns and don’t need massive scale at the click of a button. It’s like renting an office in downtown Manhattan that you only use to receive mail.

rozenmd 4y ago
This - serverless bills are astronomical for consistent traffic, even EC2 charges a premium over regular hosting.
- anovikov 4y ago
  "Premium" is a gross understatement. Depending on traffic pattern and whether app is traffic-heavy or CPU-heavy, it can be from 5x to over 100x more expensive.
  - GekkePrutser 4y ago
    Ironically this is exactly how we use AWS at work. Some exec decided we must be modern and all cloud. So they closed our datacenters and moved everything to AWS as-is. Including the process to request new "servers" with 10 tabs of complex Excel forms. They just replaced the rack location tab with one about AWS regions lol. It's as static as it can be. We even have the old lead-time for hardware emulated in the cloud now because of the complex approval process taking up similar time. When you take the agile and auto scaling out of the cloud you just end up paying more. But I'm done telling them they're holding it wrong... Nobody wants to know. I hope being modern was worth it. /s
    - anovikov 4y ago
      I had a terrible case of a client spending $6000 per month on a visibly innocent things and refused to move it into dedicated because he could not believe it can bring any savings because "clouds are cheap". Until i just did it at my own expense because with my retainer, a server cost me something like 1.5-2 hours of work per month equivalent. By the way, it's only in the US. In Europe, people are a lot less zombified and susceptible to advertisement/brand image.
    - alecco 4y ago
      > Some exec decided we must be modern and all cloud. And now this exec has this "success story" in his CV and either got a promotion or jumped ship to a better role at another company. It's a tried and true strategy for the ridiculous corporate rat race.
    - warrenm 4y ago
      >They just replaced the rack location tab with one about AWS regions lol As a first swipe ... this is smart - stepping your way into change is often better than one swell foop However, if you never revisit it / plan to improve and do things The New Way(tm), it's stupid Of course, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, Amazon, etc aren't going to do you any favors and show you how to use cloud computing more effectively than dedicated hardware unless you ask them to: they're just providing a service; if you want to pay them $100,000 for something you could do for $1750...who are they to argue?
      - GekkePrutser 4y ago
        I agree it would be a good stepping stone. But it doesn't seem like we are stepping anywhere. For example, if there was a clear vision to a real cloud-based company, I would have at least made facilities to to do new things The New Way rather than forcing everything to be the old way. Which is what they're doing. I needed a beefy server do run a big datacrunch periodically, using only minimal software which I can easily autodeploy for every crunch, run it a few hours and kill it till the next time. Sounds like a great option to use cloud, right? Kubernetes would be a bit heavy for this but I could totally ansible this. However there seems to be no way in our org to get a server I can simply spin up when I need it. It needs to be requested in advance in threefold, internal billing agreed etc, and even if I turn it off we'll still be billed for it because I can't destroy it. Destroying and spinning up a new one would mean going through the entire rigmarole again :P The funny thing is, we always do this. By the time we actually go full-on cloud, the world will already have moved on and be on the next great thing, and our neat cloud setup will be all deprecated tech.
dotancohen 4y ago
I disagree. I use my AWS EC2 instance as a VPS. For the money I get terrific customer support, access and integration with a tons of other useful services (RDS, S3), shared billing with my Glacier backups, and experience with a technology that employers value. I'm very happy, especially with the customer service.
- winrid 4y ago
  Many other providers offer the useful services you'd ever need for a smaller company (Linode for example also offers managed databases and object stores) at a fraction of the cost.
- nimchimpsky 4y ago
  This isn't really a debate is it ? You like it for reasons other than value. OK, but its more expensive than other vps providers. Customer service : if you need to use cusomter service something has gone wrong, and I literally move provider.
- 3np 4y ago
  You probably also don't have the amount of egress traffic that HN does.
  - dotancohen 4y ago
    Yes, I'm sure that for HN bandwidth is one of the most important factors. For myself it's almost an afterthought. And bandwidth is a critical fulcrum for cloud pricing comparisons.
  - warrenm 4y ago
    HN can't have that much egress traffic Even if you have 100,000 simultaneous users egressing 10k/minute (which seem implausibly high, but usable for a quick approximation), you're only looking at 40 TB/mo And that has to be off by at least an order of magnitude (if not 2 or three) There's no reason, from a bandwidth perspective, you can't host HN on $100 worth of DO droplets and some Object storage/hosted db If HN cost even $500/mo in hosting, I'd be quite surprised
blahyawnblah 4y ago
You can lease capacity for significant savings.
carlsborg 4y ago
Consider the use case of the enterprise and larger scaled out services. Very few VPS providers will give you guarantees on isolated data centers in each region (availability zones) along with the huge list of compliance programs AWS is certified for. On top of that servers are only a small piece of the AWS universe. Application services (Storage, managed replicated DBs across AZs, managed APIs, streaming, IoT, CDN, identity management...) , and serverless containers and functions are mostly unavailable on small VPS providers. As a solo developer, you don't encounter problems of scaling your engineering team and hiring devops engineers because you are doing everything yourself. The moment you have to hire expensive developers/devops all this starts making sense. But even for solo/smaller accounts, many people are using AWS as a jump host with a programmable whitelist to reach their VPS boxes. Why? Because AWS security is likely best in the world - they spend massive amounts of money on this and many banks and even government services run on them. (And even if you did us it only to scale servers, you don't need to click a button :) AWS autoscaling is finely programmable on all kind of application metrics even custom ones. Or by time of day: many teams routinely scale down their UAT and DEV clusters at night and weekends to zero with an autoscaling rule, more than halving server costs.)
starfallg 4y ago
Or running your business at WeWork locations. Enterprise public cloud like AWS really doesn't make financial sense for most large enterprises or small organisations. If you have enough scale there's no need to pay the premium. If you don't need the flexibility you don't need to pay the premium. Only those in are stuck in the middle or have use cases that need extreme 'elasticitiy' or 'agility' really benefit from using this model.
leoedin 4y ago
I agree with your point about AWS - but interestingly there's plenty of "prestige" businesses (finance, law) that rent desirable office space solely to get the address, and do most of their back office stuff elsewhere.
AnonC 4y ago
Anyone with somewhat predictable load patterns who’s using the cloud and expects to stay around for a few years should switch to “reserved instances” to reduce costs. It’d be a very poorly thought out implementation that doesn’t consider reserved instances. Reserved instances may or may not be competitive with other providers. But they’d check the CTO’s or CIO’s lists on “we’re on the cloud” and save some money.
- qeternity 4y ago
  Reserved instances are still incredibly expensive compared to bare metal AND require long term commits which bare metal typically doesn’t.
  - Uw7yTcf36gTc 4y ago
    AWS LightSail is fairly cheap and reserved.