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> except it's free because I got $5,000 in credits from AWS Activate Free credits are the ingenious marketing ploy of all big clouds to delay price comparisons

> except it's free because I got $5,000 in credits from AWS Activate Free credits are the ingenious marketing ploy of all big clouds to delay price comparisons until some amount of lock-in is achieved. Sure, you could likely host it for 1/10th to 1/5th of the cost elsewhere. But then you would have to pay from the get-go, and on AWS it's free™ (until it isn't)

ZephyrBlu 3y ago
I meant that even for hosting in the cloud it seems high. I have a hard time understanding where the cost is coming from. I can only assume it's because of the DB as opposed to the instance or S3. I wouldn't be surprised if it was over 10x cheaper if you didn't use cloud hosting.
- iot_devs 3y ago
  Database costs are very high. I am not sure I know the reason behind it honestly. Either you go with something like Dynamodb or planetscale or the least you pay is 40€/m using AWS Aurora serverless. As soon as databases start to charge for computing time the cost balloon out of reach of hobby projects.
  - RhodesianHunter 3y ago
    Because the alternative, self hosting, is labor intensive and requires experience.
- wongarsu 3y ago
  RDS is very expensive. Just following the console's advise for production instances (meaning Multi-AZ with a Proxy), a t3-medium (2 vCPU, 4GB) Postgres instance with 5GB storage is $130/month. You can get it down to $12/month by going with a t4g.micro (2 vCPU, 1GB RAM), single-az, no proxy, no backups, 5GB storage; with price after that scaling roughly linearly with RAM. But the interface will scream at you the entire time that this isn't reasonable for a production setup.
  - ZephyrBlu 3y ago
    Ah, it makes sense why costs would be high in that case. Multi-AZ + proxy seems like massive overkill for 99% of applications though.
    - jwdunne 3y ago
      We thought that at the SaaS I’m working at but AWS scheduled maintenance in our AZ and that led to significant downtime with nothing we could do about it, no compensation, nada. It was basically our fault because we didn’t use multi-AZ. I can’t remember if this was RDS or ECS but we figured if it could happen to one critical service in a single AZ, it could happen to another. I think Proxy _is_ overkill and perhaps expensive for what it is. For a pg install, running pgBouncer isn’t difficult. But I guess that depends on whether you’re authenticating with IAMs, which doesn’t sound trivial with bouncer (it might be).
    - tekla 3y ago
      Multi-AZ is freaking awesome because the literal first 10 minutes I'm forced to give a shit about my RDS DB, its already a waste of money vs the monthly cost.
  - withinboredom 3y ago
    Or just rent a bare-metal server with 32 real cpus and 128gb of ram for <100 bucks a month... My bare metal k8s cluster running on rented bare-metal costs <300 a month and I have hundreds of cores and hundreds of gb of ram available.
    - esafak 3y ago
      Where do you get servers in the US at that price?
      - withinboredom 3y ago
        OVH has them in North America. You can get 32 threads (16 cores) and 32 gb of ram for 100 euro a month (120ish USD).

ZephyrBlu 3y ago

I meant that even for hosting in the cloud it seems high. I have a hard time understanding where the cost is coming from. I can only assume it's because of the DB as opposed to the instance or S3. I wouldn't be surprised if it was over 10x cheaper if you didn't use cloud hosting.

iot_devs 3y ago
Database costs are very high. I am not sure I know the reason behind it honestly. Either you go with something like Dynamodb or planetscale or the least you pay is 40€/m using AWS Aurora serverless. As soon as databases start to charge for computing time the cost balloon out of reach of hobby projects.
- RhodesianHunter 3y ago
  Because the alternative, self hosting, is labor intensive and requires experience.
wongarsu 3y ago
RDS is very expensive. Just following the console's advise for production instances (meaning Multi-AZ with a Proxy), a t3-medium (2 vCPU, 4GB) Postgres instance with 5GB storage is $130/month. You can get it down to $12/month by going with a t4g.micro (2 vCPU, 1GB RAM), single-az, no proxy, no backups, 5GB storage; with price after that scaling roughly linearly with RAM. But the interface will scream at you the entire time that this isn't reasonable for a production setup.
- ZephyrBlu 3y ago
  Ah, it makes sense why costs would be high in that case. Multi-AZ + proxy seems like massive overkill for 99% of applications though.
  - jwdunne 3y ago
    We thought that at the SaaS I’m working at but AWS scheduled maintenance in our AZ and that led to significant downtime with nothing we could do about it, no compensation, nada. It was basically our fault because we didn’t use multi-AZ. I can’t remember if this was RDS or ECS but we figured if it could happen to one critical service in a single AZ, it could happen to another. I think Proxy _is_ overkill and perhaps expensive for what it is. For a pg install, running pgBouncer isn’t difficult. But I guess that depends on whether you’re authenticating with IAMs, which doesn’t sound trivial with bouncer (it might be).
  - tekla 3y ago
    Multi-AZ is freaking awesome because the literal first 10 minutes I'm forced to give a shit about my RDS DB, its already a waste of money vs the monthly cost.
- withinboredom 3y ago
  Or just rent a bare-metal server with 32 real cpus and 128gb of ram for <100 bucks a month... My bare metal k8s cluster running on rented bare-metal costs <300 a month and I have hundreds of cores and hundreds of gb of ram available.
  - esafak 3y ago
    Where do you get servers in the US at that price?
    - withinboredom 3y ago
      OVH has them in North America. You can get 32 threads (16 cores) and 32 gb of ram for 100 euro a month (120ish USD).