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I'm not surprised about 90% of savings. I remember that initially AWS was promoted everywhere as being "cheaper" than your own hardware, colocation or VPS/VDS h

I'm not surprised about 90% of savings. I remember that initially AWS was promoted everywhere as being "cheaper" than your own hardware, colocation or VPS/VDS hosting. Once I was working in a quite small company (around 100 employees) that hosted everything on AWS. Due to high bills (it's a small company that resided in Asia) and other problems, I migrated everything to DigitalOcean (we still used AWS for things like SES), and the monthly bill for hosting became like 10 times lower. With no other consequences (in other words, it haven't become less reliable). I still wonder who calculated that AWS is cheaper than everything else. It's definitely one of the most expensive providers.

RainyDayTmrw 1y ago
AWS is cheaper under certain, favorable (to them) assumptions, primarily around needing fewer employees to maintain the hardware.
- const_cast 1y ago
  In my mind it's very similar to how people sometimes frame the cost-effectiveness of Apple products. Like when the 5K iMac originally came out, there was a lot of people claiming it was a good value. Because if you bought a 5K display and then built a PC, that would end up being more expensive. So, like for like, Apple was cheaper. But... that assumed you even needed a 5K display, which were horribly overpriced and rare at the time. As soon as you say "4K is good enough", the cost advantage disappears, and it's not even close.
iLoveOncall 1y ago
A single developer in Denmark (it's a Danish company) would easily cost around $100K a year to the company. They might save 90% of their $24K on hardware, but just spend probably double the amount on salaries. This is why AWS is in the end cheaper if it is costs more for the same (let's be real it's not at all the same actually) software.
- hermanzegerman 1y ago
  The OP already said that they spend the same amount of time maintaining this vs AWS
  - iLoveOncall 1y ago
    For now :)
    - sksjvsla 1y ago
      If you want me to assess what I would be needing the next 5-10 years, I'd make a very different thread here on HN. The defining conditions is my current setup and business requirement. It works well and we've resisted pretending that we know where we will be in 5 years. I am reminded of the 2023 story of the surprisingly simple infra of Stack Overflow[1] and the 2025 story of that Stack overflow is almost dead[2] Given that the setup works now, one can't add that it is only working "for now". I see no client demand in the foreseeable future leading me to think that this has been fundamentally architected incorrectly. [1] https://x.com/sahnlam/status/1629713954225405952 https://x.com/sahnlam/status/1629713954225405952 [2] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/stack-overflow-is-almost-dead/ https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/stack-overflow-is-almost-...
      - iLoveOncall 1y ago
        That is absolutely not what I was talking about. I'm talking about the issues that will happen to your current setup and requirement. Disaster recovery, monitoring, etc.
        sksjvsla 1y ago
        > Disaster recovery, monitoring, etc The ISO 27001 has me audited for just that (disaster recovery and monitoring) so that settles it, no? Also worth noting that these are the two things you don't really get from the hyperscalers. If you want to count on more than their uptime guarantees, you have to roll some DR yourself and while you might think that this is easy, it is not easier than doing it with Terraform and Ansible on other clouds. I have had my DR and monitoring audited in its AWS and EU version. One was no easier or harder than the other. But the EU setup gave me a clear answer to clients on CLOUD act, Shrems II, GDPR, Safe Harbor, which is a competitive advantage.
jjani 1y ago
Interesting, comparing commodity services (VMs, storage etc) like-for-like, DO has always seemed more expensive than AWS. Do you remember what was the main source of savings?
- anticodon 1y ago
  I don't remember all the details. But the triggering point was Amazon RDS: it was complaining every week that our DB consumed all available space and we had to increase the size and pay more with every week. Our DB and flow of data wasn't that big. I've spent some time investigating but haven't found anything: sum of sizes of all tables was quite moderate and much less than the size of the storage we paid Amazon for. I lacked both expertise and time to find out where the wasted space go. After I've set up Maria DB on a smallest Digital Ocean droplet, mysterious storage growth haven't repeated and the cheapest droplet had enough capacity to serve our needs for years. Also, there were 7-10 forgotten "test" server instances and other artifacts (buckets, domains, etc) on Amazon (I believe it's also quite common, especially in bigger companies).
peer2pay 1y ago
My memory might be off here but wasn’t the initial AWS "cheaper" promise only made vs buying & maintaining your own hardware?

RainyDayTmrw 1y ago

AWS is cheaper under certain, favorable (to them) assumptions, primarily around needing fewer employees to maintain the hardware.

const_cast 1y ago
In my mind it's very similar to how people sometimes frame the cost-effectiveness of Apple products. Like when the 5K iMac originally came out, there was a lot of people claiming it was a good value. Because if you bought a 5K display and then built a PC, that would end up being more expensive. So, like for like, Apple was cheaper. But... that assumed you even needed a 5K display, which were horribly overpriced and rare at the time. As soon as you say "4K is good enough", the cost advantage disappears, and it's not even close.

iLoveOncall 1y ago

A single developer in Denmark (it's a Danish company) would easily cost around $100K a year to the company. They might save 90% of their $24K on hardware, but just spend probably double the amount on salaries. This is why AWS is in the end cheaper if it is costs more for the same (let's be real it's not at all the same actually) software.

hermanzegerman 1y ago
The OP already said that they spend the same amount of time maintaining this vs AWS
- iLoveOncall 1y ago
  For now :)
  - sksjvsla 1y ago
    If you want me to assess what I would be needing the next 5-10 years, I'd make a very different thread here on HN. The defining conditions is my current setup and business requirement. It works well and we've resisted pretending that we know where we will be in 5 years. I am reminded of the 2023 story of the surprisingly simple infra of Stack Overflow[1] and the 2025 story of that Stack overflow is almost dead[2] Given that the setup works now, one can't add that it is only working "for now". I see no client demand in the foreseeable future leading me to think that this has been fundamentally architected incorrectly. [1] https://x.com/sahnlam/status/1629713954225405952 https://x.com/sahnlam/status/1629713954225405952 [2] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/stack-overflow-is-almost-dead/ https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/stack-overflow-is-almost-...
    - iLoveOncall 1y ago
      That is absolutely not what I was talking about. I'm talking about the issues that will happen to your current setup and requirement. Disaster recovery, monitoring, etc.
      - sksjvsla 1y ago
        > Disaster recovery, monitoring, etc The ISO 27001 has me audited for just that (disaster recovery and monitoring) so that settles it, no? Also worth noting that these are the two things you don't really get from the hyperscalers. If you want to count on more than their uptime guarantees, you have to roll some DR yourself and while you might think that this is easy, it is not easier than doing it with Terraform and Ansible on other clouds. I have had my DR and monitoring audited in its AWS and EU version. One was no easier or harder than the other. But the EU setup gave me a clear answer to clients on CLOUD act, Shrems II, GDPR, Safe Harbor, which is a competitive advantage.

jjani 1y ago

Interesting, comparing commodity services (VMs, storage etc) like-for-like, DO has always seemed more expensive than AWS. Do you remember what was the main source of savings?

anticodon 1y ago
I don't remember all the details. But the triggering point was Amazon RDS: it was complaining every week that our DB consumed all available space and we had to increase the size and pay more with every week. Our DB and flow of data wasn't that big. I've spent some time investigating but haven't found anything: sum of sizes of all tables was quite moderate and much less than the size of the storage we paid Amazon for. I lacked both expertise and time to find out where the wasted space go. After I've set up Maria DB on a smallest Digital Ocean droplet, mysterious storage growth haven't repeated and the cheapest droplet had enough capacity to serve our needs for years. Also, there were 7-10 forgotten "test" server instances and other artifacts (buckets, domains, etc) on Amazon (I believe it's also quite common, especially in bigger companies).

peer2pay 1y ago

My memory might be off here but wasn’t the initial AWS "cheaper" promise only made vs buying & maintaining your own hardware?