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Tangential to the topic: I look forward to the day that fast snapshotting and snapshot restoring becomes a thing for all VPS providers like hetzner, digital oce
by nstart 4y ago
Tangential to the topic: I look forward to the day that fast snapshotting and snapshot restoring becomes a thing for all VPS providers like hetzner, digital ocean, and vultr (and all the others).
Especially if a machine is snapshotted, restored, snapshotted again, restored and the cycle continues. Even if what’s stored doesn’t get much larger the subsequent snapshot+restore processes take a little longer each time. Each provider has different timelines with vultr saying it can take up to 60 minutes for a snapshot to restore.
My use case is similar but different to code sandbox. I use a beefy remote machine for development and to keep costs low I fire it up and tear it down on demand and pay only for the hours the machine was up. It works fine for me but I just wish snapshotting+restoring was faster on these services. That would make it perfect.
- cperciva 4y agoWhy not use EC2? I find it works great as a development environment like this; starting a stopped instance takes < 5 seconds.
- nstart 4y agoBecause you have to pay for stopped instances. That’s why I snapshot and restore. It’s the same with all VPS providers (at least the reliable ones I know)
- cperciva 4y agoYou're only paying for their disks. Admittedly it's more expensive than snapshot-and-restore, but it's much cheaper than leaving the instance running.
- nstart 4y agoYeesht. I had never tried this out with AWS so I had just completely made assumptions about their stopped instance pricing. Thanks for the correction. At the same time, the pricing is rough. Instances with similar configs cost anywhere between 3-7x the price. My current bill of between 2 to 3 USD a month would go up to about 15-25 USD. In absolute terms that's not big but over the months that is going to add up. Still. Food for thought for me. Thanks again :)