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Moving away from AWS reduced our annual server costs by 80% – from $1M to $200k
- ratg13 4y agoThis has been on hn previously but can't find the threads.
- wruza 4y agoWhat technology stack do you use, and why did you choose this stack? We use Javascript everywhere, since we solve the “issues” caused by Javascript rendering we want to build as much expertise as possible in this field. But for the other parts, we are taking advantage of CloudFlare’s distributed system for fast response and global scalability. While our uptime guarantees are supported by Digital Ocean’s cloud platform. We also use a myriad of other SaaS providers to maximize our effectiveness. Quoting in case you were looking for this part like me.
- yrgulation 4y agoOne powerful reason to use aws is autoscaling. Everything else is bs.
- DeathArrow 4y agoBut you can use your own hardware for most of the traffic and use AWS when you have spikes.
- redbar0n 4y agoHow would you go about doing that?
- ckdarby 4y agoReally basic version, K8s cluster with the fronting off of AWS where AWS compute joins the cluster as part of the scaling portion. Can also use fancier concepts like tiered offloading on your non-AWS to S3 if you exceed say the bare metal disks because of some giant wave of ingestion. Apache Pulsar has that built in.
- fragmede 4y agoAn ALB fronting your service pointing to a service pool that has only your hardware at idle. In the event of a sudden growth of popularity, add AWS hosted workers to that pool to spread the load.
- mekster 4y agoDisk and snapshot costs aren't bad either which leaves me to use AWS as only a backup solution as it imposes no outbound traffic.
- _nickwhite 4y agoI'm not 100% sure what the destination platform was that was only 20% the AWS cost. Digital Ocean? A "myriad of other SaaS platforms"? Self-hosted in a colo datacenter somewhere? How does this newer solution scale? What are the intangible costs, and are there additional staff considerations? Do you answer the pager at 2AM when a physical piece of hardware goes down?
- kotlin2 4y agoDigital ocean doesn't charge traffic costs. I'm not sure if that was used in the article, but DO can provide significant savings for high-bandwidth services.
- missedthecue 4y agoSince when? When I used them they charged $10 per TB of bandwidth
- galleywest200 4y agoYou now get the first TB for free per droplet. So if you have 5 droplets thats 5 free TBs outbound per month. Inbound is always free. https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/billing/bandwidth/ https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/billing/bandwidth/
- raffraffraff 4y agoThey're also part of the bandwidth alliance, unlike AWS.
- hasperdi 4y agoDigitalocean is not a member of the bandwidth alliance
- raffraffraff 4y ago
- rickette 4y agoPreviously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33077876 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33077876
- DeathArrow 4y agoIt's easy to move if you don't use custom functionality of a particular cloud provider. That seems to be the case in this story.
- lukax 4y agoIt is not mentioned in the article but it seems they have moved to Hetzner, which has free ingress/egress. https://dnslytics.com/ip/5.9.82.52 https://dnslytics.com/ip/5.9.82.52
- mekster 4y agoHetzner is a too good to be true service. Only that they have less locations but I'd imagine they need a very well controlled data center and staff to reach that kind of cost and can't expand easily.