5 ms·

Asking: Okay, clearly there are a lot of people here with lots of experience running their software on cloud services from Microsoft, Amazon, Google, etc. Good

Asking: Okay, clearly there are a lot of people here with lots of experience running their software on cloud services from Microsoft, Amazon, Google, etc. Good. But what about a solo founder running their Web site on a "full tower" computer they plugged together themselves? So, why use a cloud server farm with its expense and complexity? Or, get a mother board, a processor with 16 cores and a 4+ GHz clock, 128 GB of main memory, some rotating and/or solid state disks for a total of 20 TB or so, some external disks for backup, a recent copy of Windows Server, applications software from .NET, and a 1 Gbps Internet connection?? The computer -- tower case, power supply, motherboard, processor, disk, solid state disks, and Windows Server -- costs ~$3000? So, a 1 Gbps Internet connection, ~$100 a month, would have capacity of, say, 100 MBps. If sending a Web page with 200 KB, then the peak capacity would be 100 MBps / 200 KB = 500 pages/second. Then 500 pages a second with 5 ads per page with revenue of, say, $2 per thousand ads sent (CPM), that would be 500 * 5 * 2 / 1000 = $5/second at peak capacity or maybe an average of half that for $2.50/second. Then at 16 hours a day that would be revenue of 2.50 * 60 * 16 * 30 = $72,000/month For the electric power, at 200 W and $0.10/KWh, that would be 200 * 24 * 30 * 0.10 / 1000 = $14.40/month How many users? With peak capacity of 500 pages a second and average of half that, 250 pages a second, for 16 hours a day, that would be 250 * 60 * 16 * 30 = 7,200,000 pages a month. If on average send 5 pages per user, that would be 7,200,000 / 5 = 1,440,000 users per month. If users come on average 2 times a week that would be 8 times a month or 1,440,000 / 8 = 180,000 users from one tower case and some Web page software. So, why use a cloud server farm with its expense and complexity?

jtwaleson 2y ago
If you have the skills, and the bottom line is still positive (include opportunity costs and personnel costs, ease of getting SOC2 / ISO certification if that's relevant to you, ease of scaling up and down), then you should go for other solutions. I advice CEOs of SMEs on this, and I can tell you that the main concern they have is availability of people to build and maintain the systems. Because cloud / k8s is more popular these days, that's what they go for. If we could reliably find smart system operators that will happily maintain a couple of racks of servers for years, it would be a more viable option.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
esseph 2y ago
Because you might need 20,000 of those "servers" immediately, and not have the up front capital to for an investment like that. And maybe it doesn't work out and you just needed those servers for 2yrs vs $your_depreciation rate
- bigbuppo 2y ago
  And you'd need about 19,997 less of those servers if you got rid of all the scummy adtech infrastructure you're implementing and just focused on the core product. Unless your core product is ads and marketing data, in which case boil those oceans so that you'll be able to show mattress ads to someone that's 0.3% more likely to be influenced to buy a new mattress when they buy a pack of gum if they're running dark mode and have a Mac but use an Android phone and are located within 217 miles of Arkabutla, but only if it's raining.
briHass 2y ago
I don't see colocation charges in there, unless you were planning on running your 'server' out of your house on a residential internet connection (that probably has restrictions on acceptable use.) By the time you spec out a real server (redundant power, higher quality components than Newegg stuff), rent some space in a rack, pay for bandwidth (50Mbps is going to be about it without paying a premium), you're going to be looking at $5000 + $300/m. All that effort, whereas you could spin up something in the cloud for a bit more per month. This does flip quickly, however. Once you get into the high 5-figure monthly spend, running your own hardware makes sense again. DHH's blog posts on 'Leaving the Cloud' are a great read.
- chupasaurus 2y ago
  > you're going to be looking at $5000 + $300/m I looked at Hetzner's $150/m for dedicated Xeon server with 1Gbps.
p_ing 2y ago
Where’s the firewall? Reverse proxy? SSL certificate management? High availability? Patch management? SCM? Central logging and alerting? As someone who ran many IIS boxes since IIS 4, I greatly prefer Azure websites over having to worry about all the “other stuff” that comes with onprem. Yes, the cloud needs an RP, WAF, etc, but they’re always HA and simple services, not another box to maintain.
icedchai 2y ago
Redundancy and failover capability, mostly (in terms of everything.... power, network, storage, compute.) For a hobby project, what you describe is probably fine. For a real business, do you want to tell customers you're down because your one computer shit the bed and you have to run to Best Buy to get a new motherboard?
- graycat 2y ago
  > For a hobby project, what you describe is probably fine. Thanks! Yup, it will be "a hobby project" until, if ever, it gets some users and revenue. Then, have several servers, some load balancing and redundancy, uninterruptible power with a generator outdoors on a concrete slab, contact Cloudflair or some such and have them do what is needed, etc. Just looked up SSL, reverse proxies, firewalls, etc. Okay.
  - ajross 2y ago
    Your local site can't implement DDoS protection though, you have to buy that from cloudflare or some other reverse proxy anyway, so cloud is always in your future in some form. Also your local site can't move to Australia or Taiwan or wherever when you realize your user base is more global than you thought. I mean, your intuition is correct that "cloud" is mostly just a bunch of boring, standard computers running boring standard software and there isn't anything they do that you can't. But at the same time, boring standard software is (by definition!) commoditized and if you're spinning up some new and interesting thing, it's only going to be differentiated by the parts that are not boring and standard. So put the boring standard stuff on a credit card and do the interesting stuff instead.
  - p_ing 2y ago
    If you want an RP, check out HA Proxy. If you're virtualized on your host, 2x HAProxy on top of OpenBSD utilizing carp. It's great fun to set up and run -- and once you have it running, it's stupid stable. Very little maintenance required. You can do this with Linux & keepalived, as well.
jiggawatts 2y ago
For small orgs: global reach! If you need an active component near your customers for low latency responses, the cloud makes it very cheap to deploy tiny VMs or small containers all over the place. It’s trivial to template this out, scale up and down for follow-the-sun or to account for local traffic spikes. If you need it, you need it, and nothing else meets this need except perhaps some CDNs with “edge compute” capabilities — however those are quite limited.
3eb7988a1663 2y ago
Careful, anytime the topic of self-hosting comes up, you will see a bunch of engineers crawl out of the woodwork to insist only the cloud can handle the complexity.
- bigbuppo 2y ago
  Because there was literally no internet before AWS. It just didn't exist. It's a story we made up.
smackeyacky 2y ago
Because backups. Because the constant attacks you’ll be under from china/russia that start 5 minutes after your servers are live. Because as a solo founder you should be hammering on new features not putting out sysadmin fires. I am happy to give AWS $200 a month to look after all that crap.
- sumedh 2y ago
  Just disable ssh password access, use ssh keys and change your default ssh port. 99% of those attacks will go away.
  - p_ing 2y ago
    If your site isn't static, you need a Web App Firewall. CN/RU will probe the website all day looking for ways in.
oofbey 2y ago
If your stuff can fit on a single server at home, and are comfortable managing it, by all means do! It’s definitely way WAY cheaper, and if budget matters, that’s great. Nothing wrong with that IMHO. Obviously you can’t 100x overnight, but that’s realistically not gonna happen. And if it does, then you can start to migrate, which probably won’t be that hard, because it’s just impossible to make a single machine anywhere near as complicated as a cloud setup.

jtwaleson 2y ago

If you have the skills, and the bottom line is still positive (include opportunity costs and personnel costs, ease of getting SOC2 / ISO certification if that's relevant to you, ease of scaling up and down), then you should go for other solutions. I advice CEOs of SMEs on this, and I can tell you that the main concern they have is availability of people to build and maintain the systems. Because cloud / k8s is more popular these days, that's what they go for. If we could reliably find smart system operators that will happily maintain a couple of racks of servers for years, it would be a more viable option.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

esseph 2y ago

Because you might need 20,000 of those "servers" immediately, and not have the up front capital to for an investment like that. And maybe it doesn't work out and you just needed those servers for 2yrs vs $your_depreciation rate

bigbuppo 2y ago
And you'd need about 19,997 less of those servers if you got rid of all the scummy adtech infrastructure you're implementing and just focused on the core product. Unless your core product is ads and marketing data, in which case boil those oceans so that you'll be able to show mattress ads to someone that's 0.3% more likely to be influenced to buy a new mattress when they buy a pack of gum if they're running dark mode and have a Mac but use an Android phone and are located within 217 miles of Arkabutla, but only if it's raining.

briHass 2y ago

I don't see colocation charges in there, unless you were planning on running your 'server' out of your house on a residential internet connection (that probably has restrictions on acceptable use.) By the time you spec out a real server (redundant power, higher quality components than Newegg stuff), rent some space in a rack, pay for bandwidth (50Mbps is going to be about it without paying a premium), you're going to be looking at $5000 + $300/m. All that effort, whereas you could spin up something in the cloud for a bit more per month. This does flip quickly, however. Once you get into the high 5-figure monthly spend, running your own hardware makes sense again. DHH's blog posts on 'Leaving the Cloud' are a great read.

chupasaurus 2y ago
> you're going to be looking at $5000 + $300/m I looked at Hetzner's $150/m for dedicated Xeon server with 1Gbps.

p_ing 2y ago

Where’s the firewall? Reverse proxy? SSL certificate management? High availability? Patch management? SCM? Central logging and alerting? As someone who ran many IIS boxes since IIS 4, I greatly prefer Azure websites over having to worry about all the “other stuff” that comes with onprem. Yes, the cloud needs an RP, WAF, etc, but they’re always HA and simple services, not another box to maintain.

icedchai 2y ago

Redundancy and failover capability, mostly (in terms of everything.... power, network, storage, compute.) For a hobby project, what you describe is probably fine. For a real business, do you want to tell customers you're down because your one computer shit the bed and you have to run to Best Buy to get a new motherboard?

graycat 2y ago
> For a hobby project, what you describe is probably fine. Thanks! Yup, it will be "a hobby project" until, if ever, it gets some users and revenue. Then, have several servers, some load balancing and redundancy, uninterruptible power with a generator outdoors on a concrete slab, contact Cloudflair or some such and have them do what is needed, etc. Just looked up SSL, reverse proxies, firewalls, etc. Okay.
- ajross 2y ago
  Your local site can't implement DDoS protection though, you have to buy that from cloudflare or some other reverse proxy anyway, so cloud is always in your future in some form. Also your local site can't move to Australia or Taiwan or wherever when you realize your user base is more global than you thought. I mean, your intuition is correct that "cloud" is mostly just a bunch of boring, standard computers running boring standard software and there isn't anything they do that you can't. But at the same time, boring standard software is (by definition!) commoditized and if you're spinning up some new and interesting thing, it's only going to be differentiated by the parts that are not boring and standard. So put the boring standard stuff on a credit card and do the interesting stuff instead.
- p_ing 2y ago
  If you want an RP, check out HA Proxy. If you're virtualized on your host, 2x HAProxy on top of OpenBSD utilizing carp. It's great fun to set up and run -- and once you have it running, it's stupid stable. Very little maintenance required. You can do this with Linux & keepalived, as well.

jiggawatts 2y ago

For small orgs: global reach! If you need an active component near your customers for low latency responses, the cloud makes it very cheap to deploy tiny VMs or small containers all over the place. It’s trivial to template this out, scale up and down for follow-the-sun or to account for local traffic spikes. If you need it, you need it, and nothing else meets this need except perhaps some CDNs with “edge compute” capabilities — however those are quite limited.

3eb7988a1663 2y ago

Careful, anytime the topic of self-hosting comes up, you will see a bunch of engineers crawl out of the woodwork to insist only the cloud can handle the complexity.

bigbuppo 2y ago
Because there was literally no internet before AWS. It just didn't exist. It's a story we made up.

smackeyacky 2y ago

Because backups. Because the constant attacks you’ll be under from china/russia that start 5 minutes after your servers are live. Because as a solo founder you should be hammering on new features not putting out sysadmin fires. I am happy to give AWS $200 a month to look after all that crap.

sumedh 2y ago
Just disable ssh password access, use ssh keys and change your default ssh port. 99% of those attacks will go away.
- p_ing 2y ago
  If your site isn't static, you need a Web App Firewall. CN/RU will probe the website all day looking for ways in.

oofbey 2y ago

If your stuff can fit on a single server at home, and are comfortable managing it, by all means do! It’s definitely way WAY cheaper, and if budget matters, that’s great. Nothing wrong with that IMHO. Obviously you can’t 100x overnight, but that’s realistically not gonna happen. And if it does, then you can start to migrate, which probably won’t be that hard, because it’s just impossible to make a single machine anywhere near as complicated as a cloud setup.