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>sounds like it is common belief that it's super expensive and a full time job to run bare metal services. Remember the age old saying: Time is money. If you

>sounds like it is common belief that it's super expensive and a full time job to run bare metal services. Remember the age old saying: Time is money. If you run your own servers, you are spending your own time and thus money to manage them. If you buy services from hosting ("cloud") providers, you spend money to have someone else manage them. The question then becomes: Do you value your time or your money more? And then you pick the one that spends the one you value less. Some people value their time, some people value their money. YMMV.

sph 2y ago
Your comment doesn't take into account that some things cost more than others, and might be not worth it their price. Running a server by yourself isn't more time consuming than having AWS do it for you. The issues that cause very long downtimes are flooding of the server room, subpar connectivity, low quality hardware, CPU is on fire. Just do not host your production services in your basement. Any VPS saves you from these, at 1/10th the AWS cost. This is obvious to anyone that has the basic skills to run a Linux host. The fact that it needs to be spelled out means that these days few have the skills and/or the others have been convinced that it is "a waste of time" and "makes only sense if your time is worthless" which is total FUD.
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  I've realized that my time only becomes more valuable as I get older, to the point that if a problem can be solved by just throwing more money at it then that is a very compelling solution. Sure, buying a VPS or whatever from a hosting provider might be cheaper than buying a full blown cloud solution, but at what personal time cost? Time is a finite resource, much more than most of us ever realize. Worse, time is a resource that cannot be replenished. Money, on the other hand, is a replenishable and theoretically infinite resource. Sometimes, paying big bucks for premium services is the cheaper solution to moving on in life.
  - jgb1984 2y ago
    It takes me more time to find what I need in the infernal hell hole of an AWS web interface, try to understand their hopelessly complex jungle of lingo and abstraction layers. Hell, I'll deploy a fresh Hetzner bare metal server with Debian in a matter of 3-4 minutes and roll with it. 10 times more bang for your buck, no vendor lock in, and guess what: I am in control. I know what runs on my server. I understand the platform inside out. I don't trust developers who are afraid of setting up their own Linux server.
    - Dalewyn 2y ago
      Both you and the parent commenter I replied to need to drop the notion these are people who are "afraid" of setting up their own servers. No, these are people who don't care about setting up their own servers. Similarly to how I just bought a NAS unit from Synology and just use Tailscale because I don't care about assembling a homebrew NAS or setting up my own VPN infrastructure, most people don't care about setting up their own servers. Why do we not care? Because time is finite and we have more important shit we need or want to attend to.
      - jgb1984 2y ago
        Because setting up your server takes an infinite amount of time, while configuring things on AWS takes zero minutes, right?
        mike_hearn 2y ago
        I think the gap here is that UNIX sysadmin skills are a lot rarer than many people imagine, and are also incredibly time consuming to learn. UNIX is many things, user friendly isn't one of them. AWS offers GUIs that are well documented. Linux has ... man pages. Probably some blog posts from 2007 if you're lucky. I mean, I admin my own servers. But I learned Linux as a kid when time was cheap. If you didn't have that experience then yeah it may make sense to just use as much cloud as possible. Sysadmin is just unpleasant even when you do know how to do it.
rcxdude 2y ago
So many people in these conversations seem to miss that buying something also takes time. There's this unspoken assumption that because you're paying someone else to do it that it'll take less of your time, but it's extremely frequently this isn't actually true. Cloud is a good example of this in a lot of cases, I've not seen a company using cloud that didn't spend a lot of time managing it, frequently far more time than they would spend managing their own servers (especially because they need to jump through a lot of hoops for spending not to spiral out of control).
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  Honestly, I'm just going to cite the Greatest Hacker News Comment Of All Time(tm)[1] and be done with it. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
  - rcxdude 2y ago
    If we're playing that game I'll link https://devnull-as-a-service.com/ https://devnull-as-a-service.com/

sph 2y ago

Your comment doesn't take into account that some things cost more than others, and might be not worth it their price. Running a server by yourself isn't more time consuming than having AWS do it for you. The issues that cause very long downtimes are flooding of the server room, subpar connectivity, low quality hardware, CPU is on fire. Just do not host your production services in your basement. Any VPS saves you from these, at 1/10th the AWS cost. This is obvious to anyone that has the basic skills to run a Linux host. The fact that it needs to be spelled out means that these days few have the skills and/or the others have been convinced that it is "a waste of time" and "makes only sense if your time is worthless" which is total FUD.

Dalewyn 2y ago
I've realized that my time only becomes more valuable as I get older, to the point that if a problem can be solved by just throwing more money at it then that is a very compelling solution. Sure, buying a VPS or whatever from a hosting provider might be cheaper than buying a full blown cloud solution, but at what personal time cost? Time is a finite resource, much more than most of us ever realize. Worse, time is a resource that cannot be replenished. Money, on the other hand, is a replenishable and theoretically infinite resource. Sometimes, paying big bucks for premium services is the cheaper solution to moving on in life.
- jgb1984 2y ago
  It takes me more time to find what I need in the infernal hell hole of an AWS web interface, try to understand their hopelessly complex jungle of lingo and abstraction layers. Hell, I'll deploy a fresh Hetzner bare metal server with Debian in a matter of 3-4 minutes and roll with it. 10 times more bang for your buck, no vendor lock in, and guess what: I am in control. I know what runs on my server. I understand the platform inside out. I don't trust developers who are afraid of setting up their own Linux server.
  - Dalewyn 2y ago
    Both you and the parent commenter I replied to need to drop the notion these are people who are "afraid" of setting up their own servers. No, these are people who don't care about setting up their own servers. Similarly to how I just bought a NAS unit from Synology and just use Tailscale because I don't care about assembling a homebrew NAS or setting up my own VPN infrastructure, most people don't care about setting up their own servers. Why do we not care? Because time is finite and we have more important shit we need or want to attend to.
    - jgb1984 2y ago
      Because setting up your server takes an infinite amount of time, while configuring things on AWS takes zero minutes, right?
      - mike_hearn 2y ago
        I think the gap here is that UNIX sysadmin skills are a lot rarer than many people imagine, and are also incredibly time consuming to learn. UNIX is many things, user friendly isn't one of them. AWS offers GUIs that are well documented. Linux has ... man pages. Probably some blog posts from 2007 if you're lucky. I mean, I admin my own servers. But I learned Linux as a kid when time was cheap. If you didn't have that experience then yeah it may make sense to just use as much cloud as possible. Sysadmin is just unpleasant even when you do know how to do it.

rcxdude 2y ago

So many people in these conversations seem to miss that buying something also takes time. There's this unspoken assumption that because you're paying someone else to do it that it'll take less of your time, but it's extremely frequently this isn't actually true. Cloud is a good example of this in a lot of cases, I've not seen a company using cloud that didn't spend a lot of time managing it, frequently far more time than they would spend managing their own servers (especially because they need to jump through a lot of hoops for spending not to spiral out of control).

Dalewyn 2y ago
Honestly, I'm just going to cite the Greatest Hacker News Comment Of All Time(tm)[1] and be done with it. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
- rcxdude 2y ago
  If we're playing that game I'll link https://devnull-as-a-service.com/ https://devnull-as-a-service.com/