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This old tale gets always told, and it is still a lie. Since AWS exists, every five years someone calculated the cost of AWS for our PHP stuff. And the results

This old tale gets always told, and it is still a lie. Since AWS exists, every five years someone calculated the cost of AWS for our PHP stuff. And the results were always the same: we could have 4 to 7 times more CPU, ram, storage and bandwidth when we just rent servers somewhere. AWS is ridiculously expensive and renting servers was always the cheaper and better option (yes, we calculated the price for our system admins). Never was any spike of usage, or growth, a problem for our servers and software.

Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
wait what? I think you might've misunderstood me. By what you mean, calculated the cost of AWS for your php stuff, and saying that it was 4-7x more expensive. Let's say you are using AWS, and your website suddenly gets 1000% spike or even more suddenly, then AWS can still host it but if you were using bare metal, you would've had to manually scale. Other than this nice benefit of AWS, there is none other benefits aside from maybe not managing servers but with things like coolify, there isn't much managing servers I guess... I am genuinely interested how you are quoting 4-7x, I know cloud is expensive but sheesh. Also, one other aspect I have always considered cloud to be cheap is probably storage, maybe please elaborate on that as well. And also what hyperscaling techniques are you currently using without AWS in case you get some really really huge unexpected traffic because that is the stuff AWS was meant for tbh
- ahofmann 1y ago
  The really huge traffic spike is the lie. Most of the time you have a pretty good idea how much traffic you will get. Only once in 20 years we noticed that our servers are getting too much traffic, because too much people clicked on our advertising. So we stopped the ads, rented more servers and started the ads again. This took half a day and costed us a few hundred euros and that was that. We aren't doing any hyper scaling and almost nobody needs this. We start PHP workers on a few servers and put the database on a beefy Server. What a beefy Server is, changes over time. In 2005 this was like 4 cores and 16 GB of RAM. Today you get like 24 cores and 128 GB RAM for about 200 € per month. On machines like that you can serve data for millions of users. AWS charges ridiculous amounts of money for servers like that. Also bandwidth pricing is a joke and always was.
- ahofmann 1y ago
  For pricing on non-aws "clouds", look at a hetzner, ionos, maybe Strato. There is also digital ocean, vultr, ovh and many others.

Imustaskforhelp 1y ago

wait what? I think you might've misunderstood me. By what you mean, calculated the cost of AWS for your php stuff, and saying that it was 4-7x more expensive. Let's say you are using AWS, and your website suddenly gets 1000% spike or even more suddenly, then AWS can still host it but if you were using bare metal, you would've had to manually scale. Other than this nice benefit of AWS, there is none other benefits aside from maybe not managing servers but with things like coolify, there isn't much managing servers I guess... I am genuinely interested how you are quoting 4-7x, I know cloud is expensive but sheesh. Also, one other aspect I have always considered cloud to be cheap is probably storage, maybe please elaborate on that as well. And also what hyperscaling techniques are you currently using without AWS in case you get some really really huge unexpected traffic because that is the stuff AWS was meant for tbh

ahofmann 1y ago
The really huge traffic spike is the lie. Most of the time you have a pretty good idea how much traffic you will get. Only once in 20 years we noticed that our servers are getting too much traffic, because too much people clicked on our advertising. So we stopped the ads, rented more servers and started the ads again. This took half a day and costed us a few hundred euros and that was that. We aren't doing any hyper scaling and almost nobody needs this. We start PHP workers on a few servers and put the database on a beefy Server. What a beefy Server is, changes over time. In 2005 this was like 4 cores and 16 GB of RAM. Today you get like 24 cores and 128 GB RAM for about 200 € per month. On machines like that you can serve data for millions of users. AWS charges ridiculous amounts of money for servers like that. Also bandwidth pricing is a joke and always was.
ahofmann 1y ago
For pricing on non-aws "clouds", look at a hetzner, ionos, maybe Strato. There is also digital ocean, vultr, ovh and many others.