10 ms·

Region-specific Machines pricing

117 points by bishopsmother 2y ago

zackify 2y ago
Pretty funny that I built an app in Brazil and then this happens right before it goes live. It would be nice to have stable pricing and not have a fear of different features costing more out of the blue. Other than this, fly has been a great service, I love the system, the CLI and litefs. It scares me that internal bandwidth charges will start being added, the application I’m using has a lot of internal transfer which is currently free.
- davedx 2y ago
  The nice thing about Fly is it’s very docker oriented, so depending on your app migrating it off may be fairly straightforward? My apps are all on Fly but in the regions without big hikes thankfully, so I’m sticking around for now, but it sucks some people are being hit by this…
  - zackify 2y ago
    Technically you are right. However my app is using litefs. In theory you could set this up on your own servers. Which is part of the reason I was so interested in it. However with fly it’s just one command to add a new region and my data is auto replicated there. That’s super nice compared to manually managing this. As long as bandwidth costs do not go up drastically I think it’ll be okay.
- estebarb 2y ago
  Internal bandwidth price is free? I decided to avoid Fly.io because the pricing page suggests it is not: "Any traffic exiting a Fly.io Machine is considered outbound data transfer, including: - traffic destined for the internet - traffic destined for other Machines or apps in your network"
  - zackify 2y ago
    I have many edge nodes with data being synced to them internally with liteFS. This is free Edit: maybe you are right actually. I have to check on this closer. App is just about to launch so I hadn’t paid so much attention
- deleted 2y ago
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miyuru 2y ago
> Did you know it costs us twice as much to rack a server in São Paulo? There is an interesting dynamic of server prices and customer spend in different parts of the world. Usually where the server prices are high, customers spend less.
- vasco 2y ago
  There's also physical limits though, and structural economic lag in terms of investment. If you look at any CDN costs globally and compare it with the number of intercontinental fiber connections between those places you generally start having a good idea that the two are related. In some places there's also just less qualified talent (due to having less ability to train people in enough universities, or just not having them for as long) and datacenter space built and extra import costs that delay everything. At some point everything will saturate and probably energy production costs will dominate (largely for cooling), but I think we're still a bit far from that.
- felipeac 2y ago
  In the case of Brazil it's mainly due to our absurd import taxes.
  - Xunjin 2y ago
    Do you have numbers to support it? If you mean import of hardware that do makes sense, but what about hardware that's already here? (I'm also Brazilian) Looking at AWS site it explains that PIS/COFINS and ISS are charged, excerpt below: "AWS SBL can issue an NFS-e to a Bra zilian customer only after receiving a valid Tax Registration Number ("TRN") (i.e., CPF/CNPJ). The relevant taxes applicable to AWS cloud services offered locally are the following: PIS and COFINS (9.25%, combined rate) and ISS (2.9%, charged by São Paulo municipality)." https://aws.amazon.com/tax-help/Brazil/ https://aws.amazon.com/tax-help/Brazil/ This is below 15% which many countries do tax for cloud services. I'm not saying that Brazilian taxes are really high, they are for hardware imports, but the taxes into the service itself does seem "fair".
    - definitelyauser 2y ago
hypeatei 2y ago
Recently evaluated Fly.io for a company project but decided against it. I get the vibe that it fits the hobby/side project market more and that they're still in startup mode.
- vdfs 2y ago
  They did remove the hobby plan too
  - gitinit 2y ago
    It can still be used for free as from my experience and the docs, monthly bills under $5 are free.
    - itake 2y ago
      Can you link to the docs you’re talking about? The docs I see say you need to have a legacy account.
      - gitinit 2y ago
        I can’t find it in their docs but they stated it in the announcement email for pay-as-you-go. I also have received a email saying they covered my ~$0.18 bill for the month. You could probably contact support for more clarification.
- x0x0 2y ago
  fwiw, we deploy on fly and are happy with it. The reason to like fly is you get a 20-ish line yaml file that replaces (and I'm not exaggerating) thousands of lines of cloudformation. It automagically sets up the equivalent of a load balancer, autoscaling group, VPCs, db, vpn, etc. And it's trivial to replicate that environment per employee. Plus the autoscaling using their firecracker stuff is fast. I'd recommend most companies who aren't using tons of aws services take a hard look at fly.
bibabaloo 2y ago
Looks like they've quietly (?) deprecated the hobby plan too. Getting 3 instances a month for free was probably too good to be true forever..
- 4ggr0 2y ago
  Why do you think that? Still visible here: https://fly.io/plans/personal https://fly.io/plans/personal I hope they don't cancel this plan, currently on it :D EDIT: Ohh, it's only visible when I'm logged in, weird... EDIT2: ...indeed > The paid Hobby plan and the Legacy Hobby plan are not available for new sign-ups. https://fly.io/docs/about/pricing/ https://fly.io/docs/about/pricing/ damn :( > If you were on the free Hobby plan at the time that the paid Hobby plan became the default for new organizations, your plan is now called the Legacy Hobby plan. Your costs stay the same as they were, with no monthly subscription fee, and no included usage beyond the free resource allowances. so i get to use the legacy hobby plan because i'm grandfathered in, nice. only use it for a hobby project with one instance anyways(see bio), if they really decide to start charging me i'll gladly leave.
- throwaway74566 2y ago
  Heya, we deprecated pretty loudly! We made a post on the community forum [0] and we sent an email to all active accounts saying the following: > The first improvement we're excited to announce is that the $5 Hobby plan is no more. We're replacing it with a very simple Pay As You Go plan. On this plan there's no more upfront $5 charge and no minimum monthly commitment. You only pay for what you use. If you don't use anything for a given month you pay $0. You still need a credit card on file to prevent abuse. But your card is only charged if you use the service. [0]: https://community.fly.io/t/fresh-produce-pay-as-you-go-plan/20385 https://community.fly.io/t/fresh-produce-pay-as-you-go-plan/...
  - dathinab 2y ago
    random side note, it would be nice if the region selector for regional pricing would display human readable region labels in addition to 3 letter acronyms.
jsheard 2y ago
How has Flys reliability been as of late? From past discussions I got the impression that despite it being quite polished on the surface, behind the scenes their operations are a bit of a mess. e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36808296 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36808296 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39365735 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39365735
- pgt 2y ago
  From personal experience, still not great. Sometimes things just don't deploy. I host my little mobile braai simulator on it (braaisim.com) because it's an art project and easy to add new domains / certificates. Convenient to be able to scale up easily if it went viral in ZA. Nice that they support Johannesburg region (jnb), though, which is close to me.
  - burningion 2y ago
    You were downvoted, but as a user, I’ve experienced the same inconsistency with deploys. There’s also a hard container size limit I’ve run into multiple times. If you add a dependency and go over the size limit, your app won’t deploy unless you switch to a GPU instance, which is substantially more expensive.
    - soulofmischief 2y ago
      One thing you can do to minimize container size is have multi-stage builds in your Dockerfile so that you are not affected by cache bloat.
    - tptacek 2y ago
      Don't switch to GPU instances just to get around the container size limit! What are you trying to do and what's the size of your container? My instinctive response here is that you're not holding it the way we expect you to: that some of what you're sticking in your container, we'd expect you to keep in a volume.
- Aeolun 2y ago
bvrlt 2y ago
Fly.io and Render.com are alternatives to Heroku. How do the two compare in terms of maturity? Can they both be trusted with production apps?
- MobileVet 2y ago
  We looked at both and chose Render based on various posts here along with our real world testing and bake off parameters. We use the Pro Ultra config and handle ~20rps on a Node / Express stack w/ 36 workers using clustering. Our bandwidth is around 50Gb / month. Render has been quite solid and the support has been on point when we have found issues or run into unexpected edge cases. I have been impressed that despite a big raise and subsequent scaling up, they continue to ship a solid product and the platform improvements have been useful as well.
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- calyhre 2y ago
  Never used Fly.io but I have a website running on Render (2.4M unique users per month) and the service is getting quite nice. Occasional hiccups, but they are improving. Not as stable as Heroku used to be 7-8 years ago yet, but it's also waaaaay cheaper. I really like their Docker support and infra as code, makes it very easy to spin up a whole thing while not being too far conceptually from Kubernetes for example.
- smallerfish 2y ago
  I have services running on each. Fly's more flexible. Render's further from the metal, and thus somewhat more limited. Both have some reliability issues and rough edges. My new stuff is mostly on Fly, but I'd use Render where I had a junior team who had zero infra chops.
- x0x0 2y ago
  Running production app on fly. There have been some hiccups but generally we're quite happy with it.
neom 2y ago
Don't know if anyone noticed, but Ben Johnson recently became head of product over there. I'm fortunate to have called Ben a friend for a long ass time now and I gotta say, I'm extremely bullish on fly as a result of this. Ben is not just a developers developer, he's genius level intelligence. https://github.com/benbjohnson https://github.com/benbjohnson (We fumbled the ball hard at DigitalOcean ngl, fingers crossed Ben can build what I dreamed of building one day!)
- tyre 2y ago
  What/why do you think DO fumbled? Fly looks like what DO could have been, and they had a 10 year head start.
  - ericcholis 2y ago
    I'm curious as well. Pretty happy with DO overall; but it is relatively vanilla as far as a hosting product goes.
- PUSH_AX 2y ago
  I’ll be bullish on fly when the awful outages stop. They had a hardware outage in the LHR region for a month, it was probably longer but I moved to a different provider so I haven’t bothered to check.
  - tptacek 2y ago
    https://fly.io/infra-log/ https://fly.io/infra-log/
- deleted 2y ago
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TiredOfLife 2y ago
They currently cost 4 times more than Hetzner.
- Aeolun 2y ago
  The big benefit of fly is that your server only costs money when it’s doing something (with autoscaling enabled).
- sofixa 2y ago
  Hetzner gives you bare (or virtual) metal that you have to install stuff on, and maintain it. Fly.io and similar give you a higher abstraction layer where you throw a Docker container and the stuff below and around it is managed for you. Basic suff like OS patches, but also autoscaling, load balancing, request routing, etc. Does the 4x difference make it up? It will depend entirely on you and how good you are with the things fly.io abstract for you, and how much you value your time spent on it.
- TillE 2y ago
  HN always mentions Hetzner, but they're no longer an exceptionally cheap VPS provider. They're basically the same price as OVH. I forget when exactly they raised their prices, but it was several years ago.
- tptacek 2y ago
  If you are literally just looking for a place to cost-effectively park a VM, you should very seriously consider Hetzner! It would be weird if there weren't use cases where Hetzner comes out ahead.
brigadier132 2y ago
This is painful, I was building for fly.io because of their dynamic request routing but I'm thinking I'm just going to go with hetzner. The cost difference is so substantial. If I want high availability I can just get 5 servers and have that much more compute available and I'd still end up paying less.
- danpalmer 2y ago
  This same argument applies to most cloud hosting, non-cloud (or less cloudy, Hetzner is a little cloudy) will always be cheaper because the service is more basic in a number of ways. Fly’s pitch is not just on demand scalable compute, but also that compute being close to the edge, and with “ops-less” deployments. All of those are factors you pay for. You could pay a little less with a big cloud provider’s serverless platform, a bit less again with regular cloud VMs, a lot less with colo hardware, and a ton less running your own DC (at scale). Obviously not all of these work for all businesses, but saying Hetzner is cheaper than Fly misses the point of those two services on the spectrum of service levels.
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  - brigadier132 2y ago
    I'm not missing the point of the service, I'm against the idea of infrastructure being an 84% margin business. But I guess this is what the VCs demand and some are willing to pay it.
  - candiddevmike 2y ago
    For a lot of people (most...?), Hetzner gives them exactly what they're looking for at an excellent price point. As an ecosystem, we never really moved past VMs, we just went up the stack more.
  - jstummbillig 2y ago
    > will always be cheaper This has me so confused. Should the cloud abstractions not clearly make the service more optimizable at scale and thus cheaper to offer? Sandboxing things, limiting options, not having to deal with users wanting to provision VMs and do all kinds of unexpected stuff? The marginal cost of the beautiful software to make all of that happen smoothly, and all the dx it affords, that will just go towards 0, no? I understand that people ask for what they can get away with. But does the market fail or am I missing a piece of the cost/price puzzle?
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echoangle 2y ago
[flagged]
- neom 2y ago
  Compliance with what exactly? When you bring servers down to Brazil it gets weird, outside just not supporting that region, not much you can't do about it. We never did anything in Brazil because it was such a huge pain in the ass, it's hard to get stuff in and expensive to rack once you're there. imo Good for fly for doing the work, even if they did have to slip someone a 5 on the way in.
  - echoangle 2y ago
    Compliance with ISO 37001 for example. As a big company, you can’t just go around and bribe random border guards to get your stuff through. I’m also not sure if it is illegal to pay bribes in other countries when you’re an American company. So compliance with laws is another problem when paying bribes. Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Corrupt_Practices_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Corrupt_Practices_Act Looks like it is explicitly forbidden to bribe foreign officials as a US entity. Not very smart to suggest you’re bribing people in other countries in official communications.
    - neom 2y ago
      It's not overt, as they mentioned in their post, mystical fees just show up on your invoice from the government. I do agree tho, it's a really silly detail to include. I'm a bit passionate about this because I ran a long disability study at DigitalOcean to see if we could do Brazil.
      - solardev 2y ago
        What does a "disability study" mean in the context of international server installs?
      - riffraff 2y ago
        I suppose you meant "feasibility study" or is "disability" the actual word?
benatkin 2y ago
> our billing system has been hot garbage for most of the life of the company I’ve heard the same thing about their core product. Oh wait, they even acknowledged it: https://community.fly.io/t/reliability-its-not-great/11253 https://community.fly.io/t/reliability-its-not-great/11253
goykasi 2y ago
So, hosting in Japan is more expensive than regions in America? JPY is in a horrible place compared to USD. That seems like a good way to push away Japanese users away -- make it more expensive in countries where the local currency is weak.
siliconc0w 2y ago
Fly is the only place I can get a lambda-like application with an attached SSD. Tigris is cool too (s3-alike but faster for our use case). FWIW, I haven't had too many reliability concerns but I have had some issues with builder VMs (can always build locally so no big deal) or non-prod environments with just one instance.
lilouartz 2y ago
Very happy with Fly.io. My website Pillser runs on it and I never had issues with them. The cost per month us just under USD 100 for hosting 3 services, including the database.
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HorizonXP 2y ago
I get that this stings, but honestly, outside of the brief outages when I'm trying to deploy for the millionth time, it's been a dream to run on Fly, with instances close to my users. It's too bad the closest region to Dubai is Romania, and Africa/SE Asia are a bit uncovered, but that's ok for now. I'm really enjoying using LiteFS and globally distributed instances for each customer, making it really easy, fast, and scalable. As the sole dev on the team right now, this is fantastic. I wish Upstash Kafka was a bit more baked, but I ended up just signing up with them directly. I had trouble using the built-in-to-Fly version, but that's fine. Can't wait to give them $1000s a month.

117 points by bishopsmother 2y ago

Pretty funny that I built an app in Brazil and then this happens right before it goes live. It would be nice to have stable pricing and not have a fear of different features costing more out of the blue. Other than this, fly has been a great service, I love the system, the CLI and litefs. It scares me that internal bandwidth charges will start being added, the application I’m using has a lot of internal transfer which is currently free.

davedx 2y ago
The nice thing about Fly is it’s very docker oriented, so depending on your app migrating it off may be fairly straightforward? My apps are all on Fly but in the regions without big hikes thankfully, so I’m sticking around for now, but it sucks some people are being hit by this…
- zackify 2y ago
  Technically you are right. However my app is using litefs. In theory you could set this up on your own servers. Which is part of the reason I was so interested in it. However with fly it’s just one command to add a new region and my data is auto replicated there. That’s super nice compared to manually managing this. As long as bandwidth costs do not go up drastically I think it’ll be okay.
estebarb 2y ago
Internal bandwidth price is free? I decided to avoid Fly.io because the pricing page suggests it is not: "Any traffic exiting a Fly.io Machine is considered outbound data transfer, including: - traffic destined for the internet - traffic destined for other Machines or apps in your network"
- zackify 2y ago
  I have many edge nodes with data being synced to them internally with liteFS. This is free Edit: maybe you are right actually. I have to check on this closer. App is just about to launch so I hadn’t paid so much attention
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miyuru 2y ago

> Did you know it costs us twice as much to rack a server in São Paulo? There is an interesting dynamic of server prices and customer spend in different parts of the world. Usually where the server prices are high, customers spend less.

vasco 2y ago
There's also physical limits though, and structural economic lag in terms of investment. If you look at any CDN costs globally and compare it with the number of intercontinental fiber connections between those places you generally start having a good idea that the two are related. In some places there's also just less qualified talent (due to having less ability to train people in enough universities, or just not having them for as long) and datacenter space built and extra import costs that delay everything. At some point everything will saturate and probably energy production costs will dominate (largely for cooling), but I think we're still a bit far from that.
felipeac 2y ago
In the case of Brazil it's mainly due to our absurd import taxes.
- Xunjin 2y ago
  Do you have numbers to support it? If you mean import of hardware that do makes sense, but what about hardware that's already here? (I'm also Brazilian) Looking at AWS site it explains that PIS/COFINS and ISS are charged, excerpt below: "AWS SBL can issue an NFS-e to a Bra zilian customer only after receiving a valid Tax Registration Number ("TRN") (i.e., CPF/CNPJ). The relevant taxes applicable to AWS cloud services offered locally are the following: PIS and COFINS (9.25%, combined rate) and ISS (2.9%, charged by São Paulo municipality)." https://aws.amazon.com/tax-help/Brazil/ https://aws.amazon.com/tax-help/Brazil/ This is below 15% which many countries do tax for cloud services. I'm not saying that Brazilian taxes are really high, they are for hardware imports, but the taxes into the service itself does seem "fair".
  - definitelyauser 2y ago

hypeatei 2y ago

Recently evaluated Fly.io for a company project but decided against it. I get the vibe that it fits the hobby/side project market more and that they're still in startup mode.

vdfs 2y ago
They did remove the hobby plan too
- gitinit 2y ago
  It can still be used for free as from my experience and the docs, monthly bills under $5 are free.
  - itake 2y ago
    Can you link to the docs you’re talking about? The docs I see say you need to have a legacy account.
    - gitinit 2y ago
      I can’t find it in their docs but they stated it in the announcement email for pay-as-you-go. I also have received a email saying they covered my ~$0.18 bill for the month. You could probably contact support for more clarification.
x0x0 2y ago
fwiw, we deploy on fly and are happy with it. The reason to like fly is you get a 20-ish line yaml file that replaces (and I'm not exaggerating) thousands of lines of cloudformation. It automagically sets up the equivalent of a load balancer, autoscaling group, VPCs, db, vpn, etc. And it's trivial to replicate that environment per employee. Plus the autoscaling using their firecracker stuff is fast. I'd recommend most companies who aren't using tons of aws services take a hard look at fly.

bibabaloo 2y ago

Looks like they've quietly (?) deprecated the hobby plan too. Getting 3 instances a month for free was probably too good to be true forever..

4ggr0 2y ago
Why do you think that? Still visible here: https://fly.io/plans/personal https://fly.io/plans/personal I hope they don't cancel this plan, currently on it :D EDIT: Ohh, it's only visible when I'm logged in, weird... EDIT2: ...indeed > The paid Hobby plan and the Legacy Hobby plan are not available for new sign-ups. https://fly.io/docs/about/pricing/ https://fly.io/docs/about/pricing/ damn :( > If you were on the free Hobby plan at the time that the paid Hobby plan became the default for new organizations, your plan is now called the Legacy Hobby plan. Your costs stay the same as they were, with no monthly subscription fee, and no included usage beyond the free resource allowances. so i get to use the legacy hobby plan because i'm grandfathered in, nice. only use it for a hobby project with one instance anyways(see bio), if they really decide to start charging me i'll gladly leave.
throwaway74566 2y ago
Heya, we deprecated pretty loudly! We made a post on the community forum [0] and we sent an email to all active accounts saying the following: > The first improvement we're excited to announce is that the $5 Hobby plan is no more. We're replacing it with a very simple Pay As You Go plan. On this plan there's no more upfront $5 charge and no minimum monthly commitment. You only pay for what you use. If you don't use anything for a given month you pay $0. You still need a credit card on file to prevent abuse. But your card is only charged if you use the service. [0]: https://community.fly.io/t/fresh-produce-pay-as-you-go-plan/20385 https://community.fly.io/t/fresh-produce-pay-as-you-go-plan/...
- dathinab 2y ago
  random side note, it would be nice if the region selector for regional pricing would display human readable region labels in addition to 3 letter acronyms.

jsheard 2y ago

How has Flys reliability been as of late? From past discussions I got the impression that despite it being quite polished on the surface, behind the scenes their operations are a bit of a mess. e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36808296 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36808296 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39365735 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39365735

pgt 2y ago
From personal experience, still not great. Sometimes things just don't deploy. I host my little mobile braai simulator on it (braaisim.com) because it's an art project and easy to add new domains / certificates. Convenient to be able to scale up easily if it went viral in ZA. Nice that they support Johannesburg region (jnb), though, which is close to me.
- burningion 2y ago
  You were downvoted, but as a user, I’ve experienced the same inconsistency with deploys. There’s also a hard container size limit I’ve run into multiple times. If you add a dependency and go over the size limit, your app won’t deploy unless you switch to a GPU instance, which is substantially more expensive.
  - soulofmischief 2y ago
    One thing you can do to minimize container size is have multi-stage builds in your Dockerfile so that you are not affected by cache bloat.
  - tptacek 2y ago
    Don't switch to GPU instances just to get around the container size limit! What are you trying to do and what's the size of your container? My instinctive response here is that you're not holding it the way we expect you to: that some of what you're sticking in your container, we'd expect you to keep in a volume.
Aeolun 2y ago

bvrlt 2y ago

Fly.io and Render.com are alternatives to Heroku. How do the two compare in terms of maturity? Can they both be trusted with production apps?

MobileVet 2y ago
We looked at both and chose Render based on various posts here along with our real world testing and bake off parameters. We use the Pro Ultra config and handle ~20rps on a Node / Express stack w/ 36 workers using clustering. Our bandwidth is around 50Gb / month. Render has been quite solid and the support has been on point when we have found issues or run into unexpected edge cases. I have been impressed that despite a big raise and subsequent scaling up, they continue to ship a solid product and the platform improvements have been useful as well.
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calyhre 2y ago
Never used Fly.io but I have a website running on Render (2.4M unique users per month) and the service is getting quite nice. Occasional hiccups, but they are improving. Not as stable as Heroku used to be 7-8 years ago yet, but it's also waaaaay cheaper. I really like their Docker support and infra as code, makes it very easy to spin up a whole thing while not being too far conceptually from Kubernetes for example.
smallerfish 2y ago
I have services running on each. Fly's more flexible. Render's further from the metal, and thus somewhat more limited. Both have some reliability issues and rough edges. My new stuff is mostly on Fly, but I'd use Render where I had a junior team who had zero infra chops.
x0x0 2y ago
Running production app on fly. There have been some hiccups but generally we're quite happy with it.

neom 2y ago

Don't know if anyone noticed, but Ben Johnson recently became head of product over there. I'm fortunate to have called Ben a friend for a long ass time now and I gotta say, I'm extremely bullish on fly as a result of this. Ben is not just a developers developer, he's genius level intelligence. https://github.com/benbjohnson https://github.com/benbjohnson (We fumbled the ball hard at DigitalOcean ngl, fingers crossed Ben can build what I dreamed of building one day!)

tyre 2y ago
What/why do you think DO fumbled? Fly looks like what DO could have been, and they had a 10 year head start.
- ericcholis 2y ago
  I'm curious as well. Pretty happy with DO overall; but it is relatively vanilla as far as a hosting product goes.
PUSH_AX 2y ago
I’ll be bullish on fly when the awful outages stop. They had a hardware outage in the LHR region for a month, it was probably longer but I moved to a different provider so I haven’t bothered to check.
- tptacek 2y ago
  https://fly.io/infra-log/ https://fly.io/infra-log/
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TiredOfLife 2y ago

They currently cost 4 times more than Hetzner.

Aeolun 2y ago
The big benefit of fly is that your server only costs money when it’s doing something (with autoscaling enabled).
sofixa 2y ago
Hetzner gives you bare (or virtual) metal that you have to install stuff on, and maintain it. Fly.io and similar give you a higher abstraction layer where you throw a Docker container and the stuff below and around it is managed for you. Basic suff like OS patches, but also autoscaling, load balancing, request routing, etc. Does the 4x difference make it up? It will depend entirely on you and how good you are with the things fly.io abstract for you, and how much you value your time spent on it.
TillE 2y ago
HN always mentions Hetzner, but they're no longer an exceptionally cheap VPS provider. They're basically the same price as OVH. I forget when exactly they raised their prices, but it was several years ago.
tptacek 2y ago
If you are literally just looking for a place to cost-effectively park a VM, you should very seriously consider Hetzner! It would be weird if there weren't use cases where Hetzner comes out ahead.

brigadier132 2y ago

This is painful, I was building for fly.io because of their dynamic request routing but I'm thinking I'm just going to go with hetzner. The cost difference is so substantial. If I want high availability I can just get 5 servers and have that much more compute available and I'd still end up paying less.

danpalmer 2y ago
This same argument applies to most cloud hosting, non-cloud (or less cloudy, Hetzner is a little cloudy) will always be cheaper because the service is more basic in a number of ways. Fly’s pitch is not just on demand scalable compute, but also that compute being close to the edge, and with “ops-less” deployments. All of those are factors you pay for. You could pay a little less with a big cloud provider’s serverless platform, a bit less again with regular cloud VMs, a lot less with colo hardware, and a ton less running your own DC (at scale). Obviously not all of these work for all businesses, but saying Hetzner is cheaper than Fly misses the point of those two services on the spectrum of service levels.
- deleted 2y ago
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- brigadier132 2y ago
  I'm not missing the point of the service, I'm against the idea of infrastructure being an 84% margin business. But I guess this is what the VCs demand and some are willing to pay it.
- candiddevmike 2y ago
  For a lot of people (most...?), Hetzner gives them exactly what they're looking for at an excellent price point. As an ecosystem, we never really moved past VMs, we just went up the stack more.
- jstummbillig 2y ago
  > will always be cheaper This has me so confused. Should the cloud abstractions not clearly make the service more optimizable at scale and thus cheaper to offer? Sandboxing things, limiting options, not having to deal with users wanting to provision VMs and do all kinds of unexpected stuff? The marginal cost of the beautiful software to make all of that happen smoothly, and all the dx it affords, that will just go towards 0, no? I understand that people ask for what they can get away with. But does the market fail or am I missing a piece of the cost/price puzzle?

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echoangle 2y ago

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neom 2y ago
Compliance with what exactly? When you bring servers down to Brazil it gets weird, outside just not supporting that region, not much you can't do about it. We never did anything in Brazil because it was such a huge pain in the ass, it's hard to get stuff in and expensive to rack once you're there. imo Good for fly for doing the work, even if they did have to slip someone a 5 on the way in.
- echoangle 2y ago
  Compliance with ISO 37001 for example. As a big company, you can’t just go around and bribe random border guards to get your stuff through. I’m also not sure if it is illegal to pay bribes in other countries when you’re an American company. So compliance with laws is another problem when paying bribes. Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Corrupt_Practices_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Corrupt_Practices_Act Looks like it is explicitly forbidden to bribe foreign officials as a US entity. Not very smart to suggest you’re bribing people in other countries in official communications.
  - neom 2y ago
    It's not overt, as they mentioned in their post, mystical fees just show up on your invoice from the government. I do agree tho, it's a really silly detail to include. I'm a bit passionate about this because I ran a long disability study at DigitalOcean to see if we could do Brazil.
    - solardev 2y ago
      What does a "disability study" mean in the context of international server installs?
    - riffraff 2y ago
      I suppose you meant "feasibility study" or is "disability" the actual word?

benatkin 2y ago

> our billing system has been hot garbage for most of the life of the company I’ve heard the same thing about their core product. Oh wait, they even acknowledged it: https://community.fly.io/t/reliability-its-not-great/11253 https://community.fly.io/t/reliability-its-not-great/11253

goykasi 2y ago

So, hosting in Japan is more expensive than regions in America? JPY is in a horrible place compared to USD. That seems like a good way to push away Japanese users away -- make it more expensive in countries where the local currency is weak.

siliconc0w 2y ago

Fly is the only place I can get a lambda-like application with an attached SSD. Tigris is cool too (s3-alike but faster for our use case). FWIW, I haven't had too many reliability concerns but I have had some issues with builder VMs (can always build locally so no big deal) or non-prod environments with just one instance.

lilouartz 2y ago

Very happy with Fly.io. My website Pillser runs on it and I never had issues with them. The cost per month us just under USD 100 for hosting 3 services, including the database.

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HorizonXP 2y ago

I get that this stings, but honestly, outside of the brief outages when I'm trying to deploy for the millionth time, it's been a dream to run on Fly, with instances close to my users. It's too bad the closest region to Dubai is Romania, and Africa/SE Asia are a bit uncovered, but that's ok for now. I'm really enjoying using LiteFS and globally distributed instances for each customer, making it really easy, fast, and scalable. As the sole dev on the team right now, this is fantastic. I wish Upstash Kafka was a bit more baked, but I ended up just signing up with them directly. I had trouble using the built-in-to-Fly version, but that's fine. Can't wait to give them $1000s a month.