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One of the more detrimental aspects of the Cloud Tax is that it constrains the types of solutions engineers even consider. Picking an arbitrary price point of

by runako 1y ago

One of the more detrimental aspects of the Cloud Tax is that it constrains the types of solutions engineers even consider. Picking an arbitrary price point of $200/mo, you can get 4(!) vCPUs and 16GB of RAM at AWS. Architectures are different etc., but this is roughly a mid-spec dev laptop of 5 or so years ago. At Hetzner, you can rent a machine with 48 cores and 128GB of RAM for the same money. It's hard to overstate how far apart these machines are in raw computational capacity. There are approaches to problems that make sense with 10x the capacity that don't make sense on the much smaller node. Critically, those approaches can sometimes save engineering time that would otherwise go into building a more complex system to manage around artificial constraints. Yes, there are other factors like durability etc. that need to be designed for. But going the other way, dedicated boxes can deliver more consistent performance without worries of noisy neighbors.

andersmurphy 1y ago
100% this add an embedded database like sqlite and optimise writes to batch and you can go really really far with hetzner. It's also why I find the "what about overprovisioning" argument silly (once you look outside of AWS you can get insane cost/perf ratio). Also in my experience more complex systems tend to have much less reliability/resilience than simple single node systems. Things rarely fail in isolation.
Demiurge 1y ago
I think it’s the other way around. I’m a huge fan of Hetzner for small sites with a few users. However, for bigger projects, the cloud seems to offer a complete lack of constraints. For projects that can pay for my time, $200/m or $2000/m in hosting costs is a negligible difference. What’s the development cost difference between AWS CDK / Terraform + GitHub Actions vs. Docker / K8s / Ansible + any CI pipeline? I don’t know; in my experience, I don’t see how “bare metal” saves much engineering time. I also don’t see anything complicated about using an IaC Fargate + RDS template. Now, if you actually need to decouple your file storage and make it durable and scalable, or need to dynamically create subdomains, or any number of other things… The effort of learning and integrating different dedicated services at the infrastructure level to run all this seems much more constraining. I’ve been doing this since before the “Cloud,” and in my view, if you have a project that makes money, cloud costs are a worthwhile investment that will be the last thing that constrains your project. If cloud costs feel too constraining for your project, then perhaps it’s more of a hobby than a business—at least in my experience. Just thinking about maintaining multiple cluster filesystems and disk arrays—it’s just not what I would want to be doing with most companies’ resources or my time. Maybe it’s like the difference between folks who prefer Arch and setting up Emacs just right, versus those happy with a MacBook. If I felt like changing my kernel scheduler was a constraint, I might recommend Arch; but otherwise, I recommend a MacBook. :) On the flip side, I’ve also tried to turn a startup idea into a profitable project with no budget, where raw throughput was integral to the idea. In that situation, a dedicated server was absolutely the right choice, saving us thousands of dollars. But the idea did not pan out. If we had gotten more traction, I suspect we would have just vertically scaled for a while. But it’s unusual.
- runako 1y ago
  > I really don't see how "bare metal" saves any engineering time This is because you are looking only at provisioning/deployment. And you are right -- node size does not impact DevOps all that much. I am looking at the solution space available to the engineers who write the software that ultimately gets deployed on the nodes. And that solution space is different when the nodes have 10x the capability. Yes, cloud providers have tons of aggregate capability. But designing software to run on a fleet of small machines is very different from accomplishing the same tasks on a single large machine. It would not be controversial to suggest that targeting code at an Apple Watch or Raspberry Pi imposes constraints on developers that do not exist when targeting desktops. I am saying the same dynamic now applies to targeting cloud providers. This isn't to say there's a single best solution for everything. But there are tradeoffs that are now always apparent. The art is knowing when it makes sense to pay the Cloud Tax, and whether to go 100% Cloud vs some proportion of dedicated.
  - Demiurge 1y ago
    Overall, I agree that most people underestimate the runway that the modern dedicated server can give you.
  - sevensor 1y ago
    I’ve seen multiple projects founder on the complexity of writing software for the cloud. Moving data from here to there ends up being way harder than anybody expected. Maybe teams with more experience build this into their planning, but from what I’ve seen, if you’re using the cloud, your solution ends up being 95% about getting data where it’s supposed to be and 5% application logic.
    - Esophagus4 1y ago
      This sounds a people problem, not a technology problem. I’ve never had an issue with moving data.
- benterix 1y ago
  > I’m a huge fan of Hetzner ... I don’t see how “bare metal” saves much engineering time. I think you confuse Heztner with bare metal. Hetzner has Hetzner Cloud which is like AWS EC2 but much cheaper. (They also have bare metal servers which are even cheaper.) With Heztner Cloud, you can use Terraform, Github Actions and whatever else you mentioned.
shrubble 1y ago
It's more than that - it's all the latency that you can remove from the equation with your bare-metal server. No network latency between nodes, less memory bandwidth latency/contention as there is in VMs, no caching architecture latency needed when you can just tell e.g. Postgres to use gigs of RAM and then let Linux's disk caching take care of the rest (and not need a separate caching architecture).
- matt-p 1y ago
  The difference between a fairly expensive ($300) RDS instance + EC2 in the same region vs a $90 dedicated server with a NVME drive and postgres in a container is absolutely insane.
  - bspammer 1y ago
    A fair comparison would include the cost of the DBA who will be responsible for backups, updates, monitoring, security and access control. That’s what RDS is actually competing with.
    - matt-p 1y ago
      Totally. My frustration isn't even price though RDS is literally just dog slow.
    - shrubble 1y ago
      Paying someone $2000 to set that up once should result in the costs being recovered in what, 18 months? If you’re running Postgres locally you can turn off the TCP/IP part; nothing more to audit there. SSH based copying of backups to a remote server is simple. If not accessible via network, you can stay on whatever version of Postgres you want. I’ve heard these arguments since AWS launched, and all that time I’ve been running Postgres (since 2004 actually) and have never encountered all these phantom issues that are claimed as being expensive or extremely difficult.
      - applied_heat 1y ago
themafia 1y ago
On AWS if you want raw computational capacity you use Lambda and not EC2. EC2 is for legacy type workloads and doesn't have nearly the same scaling power and speed that Lambda does. I have several workloads that just invoke Lambda in parallel. Now I effectively have a 1000 core machine and can blast through large workloads without even thinking about it. I have no VM to maintain or OS image to consider or worry about. Which highlights the other difference that you failed to mention. Hertzner charges a "one time setup" fee to create that VM. That puts a lot of back pressure on infrastructure decisions and removes any scalability you could otherwise enjoy in the cloud. If you want to just rent a server then Hertzner is great. If you actually want to run "in the cloud" then Hertzner is a non-starter.
- matt-p 1y ago
  Very few providers charge setup, some will provision a server within a 90s of an api call.
  - themafia 1y ago
    Hertzner does on the server the OP was referencing: https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ax162-s/ https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ax162-s/
    - matt-p 1y ago
      I don't think that negates the point I was making. Most don't, for example none of the providers on https://www.serversearcher.com/ https://www.serversearcher.com/ seem to charge setup.
    - Aeolun 1y ago
      If you are scared off by the €80 setup on a server that costs €200 a month, it seems like the setup fee did its intended job no?
    - ferngodfather 1y ago
      Most providers do for dedicated servers, or make you agree to a fixed term. I don't believe they do the same for VPS / Cloud servers.
ldoughty 1y ago
I agree that AWS EC2 is probably too expensive on the whole. It also doesn't really provide any of the greater benefits of the cloud that come from "someone else's server". However, to the point of microservices as the article mentions, you probably should look at lambda (or fargate, or a mix) unless you can really saturate the capacity of multiple servers. When we swapped to ECS+EC2 running microservices over to lambda our costs dropped sharply. Even serving millions of requests a day we spend a lot of time in between idle, especially spread across the services. Additionally, we have 0 outages now from hardware in the last 5 years. As an engineer, this has made my QoL significantly better.
- jgalt212 1y ago
  > I agree that AWS EC2 is probably too expensive on the whole. Probably? It's about 5-10X more expensive than equivalent services from Hetzner.
Spooky23 1y ago
It really depends on what you are doing. But when you factor the network features, the ability to scale the solution, etc you get alot of stuff inside that $200/mo EC2 device. The product is more than the VM. That said, with a defined workload without a ton of variation or segmentation needs there are lots of ways to deliver a cheaper solution.
- troupo 1y ago
  > you get alot of stuff inside that $200/mo EC2 device. The product is more than the VM. What are you getting, and do you need it?
  - throwaway7783 1y ago
    Probably not for $200/mo EC2, but AWS/GCP in general * Centralized logging, log search, log based alerting * Secrets manager * Managed kubernetes * Object store * Managed load balancers * Database HA * Cache solutions ... Can I run all these by myself? Sure. But I'm not in this business. I just want to write software and run that. And yes, I have needed most of this from day 1 for my startup. For a personal toy project, or when you reach a certain scale, it may makes sense to go the other way. U
    - ozozozd 1y ago
      You need database HA and load balancers on day 1? You must be doing truly a lot of growth prior to building. Or perhaps insisting on tiny VMs for your loads?
      - swiftcoder 1y ago
        > Or perhaps insisting on tiny VMs for your loads? This happens way too often. Early-stage startups that build everything on the AWS free tier (t2.micro only!), and then when the time comes they scale everything horizontally
        1y ago
cedws 1y ago
I don’t disagree but “cores” is not a good measure of computational power.
- christophilus 1y ago
  True, but the cores on a dedicated Hetzner box obliterate the cores on an EC2 machine every time I’ve tested them. So, if anything, it understates the massive performance gap.
  - andersmurphy 1y ago
    Hetzner also tends to have more modern SSDs with the latest nvme. Which can make a massive difference for your DB.
    - Nextgrid 1y ago
      It's less about the modernity of SSDs and more about a fundamental difference: all persistent storage on AWS is actually networked - it's exposed to you as NVME but it's actually on a SAN and all IO requests go over the network. You can get actual direct-attached SSDs on EC2 (and I'd expect performance to be on-par with Hetzner), but those are ephemeral and you lose them on reboot.
      - andersmurphy 1y ago
        Wow, that's crazy, I was wondering why the numbers I were seeing on AWS were so much worse. I assumed it was the drive modernity. But network makes a lot more sense. Thanks for the insight!
t_mahmood 1y ago
I don't get why people are so hell-bent on going to AWS, for the most minor applications, without looking at simpler options! I am not even thousands km near the level of what you are doing, but my client was paying $100/m for an AWS server, SQS and S3 bucket, for a small PHP based web application that uses Amazon Seller API, Keepa API for the products he ships. Used MySQL for data storage. I implemented the whole thing in Python, Django, and PostgreSQL (initially used SQLite) put it in a $25/m unmanaged VPS. I have not got any complaints about performance, and it's running continuously updating product prices, details, processing PDF invoices using OCR, finding missing products in shipments, while also serving the website, and a 4 core server with 6GB RAM is handling it just fine. The load is not going to be so high to require AWS and friends, for now. It's a small internal app, probably won't even get over 100 users, and if it ever does, it's extremely simple to migrate, because the app is so compact, even though not exactly monolithic. And still, it probably won't need a $100 AWS server, unless we are scaling up much larger.
- 3shv 1y ago
  What are some cheaper and better hosting providers that you can recommend?
  - ferngodfather 1y ago
    Hetzner! They do ask for ID though.
  - benterix 1y ago
    Hetzner. For most public cloud providers you have to give them your credit card number so they can charge an arbitrary amount. For Hetzner, instead of CC#, you give a scan of your ID (of course you can attach your CC too or Paypal). Personally I do my payments via a bank transfer. I recently paid for the whole 2025 and 2026 for all my k8s clusters. It gives unimaginable peace of mind when compared to AWS/GCP/Azure. Plus, their cloud instances often spin up much faster than EC2.
  - t_mahmood 1y ago
    I have used Knownhost previously, it served me really well. Before that, I used to go for Linode, but I think they've become more pricey?
benjiro 1y ago
> At Hetzner, you can rent a machine with 48 cores and 128GB of RAM for the same money. The problem that Hetzner and a lot of hardware providing hosts have, is the lack of affordable flexibility. Hetzner their design is based upon a base range of standardized products. This can only be upgraded within a pre-approved range of upgrade options (limited to storage/memory). Upgrades are often a mixed bag of carefully designed "upgrade paths". As you can expect, upgrades are not cheap. Doubling the storage on a base server, often increases the price of your server by 50 to 75%. The typical customizing will cost you dearly. This is where AWS wins a lot more. Yes, they are expensive as hell, but you often are not stuck to a base config and a limited upgrade path. The ability to scale beyond what Hetzner can offer is there, and your not forced to overbuy from the start. Transferring between servers is a few buttons and done. With Hetzner, if you did not overspec from the start, your going to do those fun server migrations. The ironic part is, that buying your own hardware and running it yourself, often ends up paying back within a 8~12 month periode (not counting electricity / internet). And you maintain a lot more flexibility. * You want to use bifurcation, go for it. * You want to use consumer 4TB nvme's for second layer read storage (what hetzner refuses to offer as they limited those to 2TB and only one a few servers), go for it. * You want a 10Gbit interlink between your server, go for it. No need to pay a monthly fee! No need to reserve "future space". * O, you want a 25Gbit, go for it (hetzner = not possible). * You want 50Gbit ... * You want to chuck in a few LLM capable GPUs without breaking the bank... Its ironic that we are 2025 and Hetzner is stil limited to 1Gbit connection on its hardware, when just about any consumer level hardware has 2.5Gbit by default for years. Your own hardware gives you the flexibility of AWS and the cost saving beyond Hetzner. Maybe its just my environment, but i see more and more smaller to medium companies going back to their own locally run servers. Not even colocation. The increase in consumer level fiber, what used to be expensive or not available, has opened the doors for businesses. Most companies do not need insane backbones. The fact that you can get business fiber 10Gbit for a 100 Euro price in some EU countries (of course never the north), is insane. I even seen some folks combining fiber with starlink & 5G as backup in case their fiber fails/is out. As long as you fit within a specific usage case that is being offered by Hetzner, they are cheap. But its the moment you step outside that comfort zone, ... This is one of Hetzner weaknesses and where AWS or Self hosted comes back.
- 1y ago
benreesman 1y ago
In 2025 if you need convenience and no red tape you've got fly.io in the general case and maybe Vercel or something on a particular framework (there are some good ones for a particular stack). If your needs go beyond that? Then you need real computers with real configuration and you have OVH/Hetzner/Latitude who will rent you MONSTER machines for the cost of some cheap-ass surplus 2017 Intel on The Cloud. And if you just want a blog or whatever? Zillion VPS options. The traditional cloud is for regulatory/process/corruption capture extraction in 2025: its machine economics and developer productivity use case is fucking zero I've seen. Maybe there's some edge case where a completely unencumbered team is better off with DMV trip permissions theatre, remnant Intel racked with noisy neighbors at massive markup, and no support recourse.
- nine_k 1y ago
  (1) How does fly.io reliability compare to AWS, GCP, or maybe Linode or DO? (2) What do you do if your large Hetzner server starts to show signs of malfunction? How soon would you be able to replace it, and how easily? (2a) What do you do when your large Hetzner server just dies? I see that this happens rarely, but what's your contingency plan, if any? (3) What do you do when your load is highly spiky? Do you reserve bare metal capacity for the biggest peak you expect to serve, because it's so much cheaper than running an elastic serverless architecture of the same capacity anyway? (4) Considering that your stack still includes many components, how do you manage them, and how expensive is the management overhead? Do you need an extra SRE? These are not rhetorical questions; I'd love to hear firm real practitioners! (E.g. Stack Overflow used to do deep dives into their few-big-servers architecture.)
  - runako 1y ago
    These are great questions. A key factor underlining all of this is understanding, from a business/organizational perspective, your actual uptime requirements. Google may aim at 5 nines with the budget to achieve it, but many banks have routine planned downtime. If you don't know your objectives, you will have trouble making the tradeoffs necessary to get there. As a hypothetical, would your business choose 99.999% uptime (26 seconds down on average per month) vs 99.99% (4.3 min) if that caused infra costs to rise by 50% or more? If you said we can cut our infra costs by 50% by planning a short weekly maintenance window, how would that resonate? Speaking to a few, in my experience: 2) (not at Hetzner specifically, but at a dedicated host). You have backups & recovery plans, and redundancy where it makes sense. You might run your database with a replica. If you are serving Web traffic, maybe you keep a hot spare. Also, you are still allowed to use e.g. cloud services if it makes sense to do so so you can backup to S3 and use things like SQS or KMS if you don't want to run them yourself. It's worth noting that you may not get advance notice; I recall our service being impacted by a fire at a datacenter that IIRC was caused by a traffic accident on a nearby highway. The point is you have to design resilience into the system. Fortunately, this is well-trod ground. It would not be a terrible failover option to have something like an autoscale group at AWS ready to step in if the dedicated cluster goes offline. Keep that cluster scaled to 0 until it's needed. Put the cloud behind your cheap dedicated capacity. 3) See above. In my case, we over-provisioned because it's cheap to do so. I did not do this at the time, but I would probably look at running a replicated database with a hot standby on another server. 4) It has not been my experience that "modern" cloud deployments require fewer SRE resources. Like water running downhill, cloud projects seek complexity.
cnst 1y ago
> types of solutions engineers even consider I think the issue is actually the opposite. With the cloud, the engineers fail to see the actual cost of their inefficient scaled-out code, because someone else (the CFO) pays the bill; and the answer to any issue, is simply adding more "workers" and more "cloud", since they're basically "free" from the perspective of the employee. (And the more "cloud" something is, like, the serverless, the more "free", completely inverting the economics of making a profit on the service — when the CFO tells you that your AWS bill is too high, you move everything from the EC2 to AWS Lambda, since the salesperson from AWS tells you that serverless is far cheaper, only for the bill to get even higher, for reasons unknown, of course.) Whom the cloud tax actually constrains are the entrepreneurs and solo-preneurs. If you have to pay $5000/mo to AWS just for the infra, you can only go so long without lots of revenue, and you'd need to have a whopping 5k/mo+ worth of revenue before breaking even. Yet with a $200/mo like at OVH or Hetzner, you can afford to let it grow at negligible cost to yourself, and it can basically start being profitable with the first few users. Don't believe this? Look at the blog entries by the guy who bought Yahoo!'s Delicious, written before they went bankrupt and were up for sale. He was basically pointing out that the services have roughly the same number of users, and require the same engineering resources, yet one is being operated at a loss, whereas the other one makes a profit (guess which one, and guess why). * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website) * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinboard_(website) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinboard_(website) * https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=blog.pinboard.in https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=blog.pinboard.in So, literally, the difference between the cloud and renting One Big Server, is making a loss and going out of business, and remaining in business and purchasing your underwater competitor for pennies on the dollar.

by runako 1y ago

andersmurphy 1y ago

100% this add an embedded database like sqlite and optimise writes to batch and you can go really really far with hetzner. It's also why I find the "what about overprovisioning" argument silly (once you look outside of AWS you can get insane cost/perf ratio). Also in my experience more complex systems tend to have much less reliability/resilience than simple single node systems. Things rarely fail in isolation.

Demiurge 1y ago

I think it’s the other way around. I’m a huge fan of Hetzner for small sites with a few users. However, for bigger projects, the cloud seems to offer a complete lack of constraints. For projects that can pay for my time, $200/m or $2000/m in hosting costs is a negligible difference. What’s the development cost difference between AWS CDK / Terraform + GitHub Actions vs. Docker / K8s / Ansible + any CI pipeline? I don’t know; in my experience, I don’t see how “bare metal” saves much engineering time. I also don’t see anything complicated about using an IaC Fargate + RDS template. Now, if you actually need to decouple your file storage and make it durable and scalable, or need to dynamically create subdomains, or any number of other things… The effort of learning and integrating different dedicated services at the infrastructure level to run all this seems much more constraining. I’ve been doing this since before the “Cloud,” and in my view, if you have a project that makes money, cloud costs are a worthwhile investment that will be the last thing that constrains your project. If cloud costs feel too constraining for your project, then perhaps it’s more of a hobby than a business—at least in my experience. Just thinking about maintaining multiple cluster filesystems and disk arrays—it’s just not what I would want to be doing with most companies’ resources or my time. Maybe it’s like the difference between folks who prefer Arch and setting up Emacs just right, versus those happy with a MacBook. If I felt like changing my kernel scheduler was a constraint, I might recommend Arch; but otherwise, I recommend a MacBook. :) On the flip side, I’ve also tried to turn a startup idea into a profitable project with no budget, where raw throughput was integral to the idea. In that situation, a dedicated server was absolutely the right choice, saving us thousands of dollars. But the idea did not pan out. If we had gotten more traction, I suspect we would have just vertically scaled for a while. But it’s unusual.

runako 1y ago
> I really don't see how "bare metal" saves any engineering time This is because you are looking only at provisioning/deployment. And you are right -- node size does not impact DevOps all that much. I am looking at the solution space available to the engineers who write the software that ultimately gets deployed on the nodes. And that solution space is different when the nodes have 10x the capability. Yes, cloud providers have tons of aggregate capability. But designing software to run on a fleet of small machines is very different from accomplishing the same tasks on a single large machine. It would not be controversial to suggest that targeting code at an Apple Watch or Raspberry Pi imposes constraints on developers that do not exist when targeting desktops. I am saying the same dynamic now applies to targeting cloud providers. This isn't to say there's a single best solution for everything. But there are tradeoffs that are now always apparent. The art is knowing when it makes sense to pay the Cloud Tax, and whether to go 100% Cloud vs some proportion of dedicated.
- Demiurge 1y ago
  Overall, I agree that most people underestimate the runway that the modern dedicated server can give you.
- sevensor 1y ago
  I’ve seen multiple projects founder on the complexity of writing software for the cloud. Moving data from here to there ends up being way harder than anybody expected. Maybe teams with more experience build this into their planning, but from what I’ve seen, if you’re using the cloud, your solution ends up being 95% about getting data where it’s supposed to be and 5% application logic.
  - Esophagus4 1y ago
    This sounds a people problem, not a technology problem. I’ve never had an issue with moving data.
benterix 1y ago
> I’m a huge fan of Hetzner ... I don’t see how “bare metal” saves much engineering time. I think you confuse Heztner with bare metal. Hetzner has Hetzner Cloud which is like AWS EC2 but much cheaper. (They also have bare metal servers which are even cheaper.) With Heztner Cloud, you can use Terraform, Github Actions and whatever else you mentioned.

shrubble 1y ago

It's more than that - it's all the latency that you can remove from the equation with your bare-metal server. No network latency between nodes, less memory bandwidth latency/contention as there is in VMs, no caching architecture latency needed when you can just tell e.g. Postgres to use gigs of RAM and then let Linux's disk caching take care of the rest (and not need a separate caching architecture).

matt-p 1y ago
The difference between a fairly expensive ($300) RDS instance + EC2 in the same region vs a $90 dedicated server with a NVME drive and postgres in a container is absolutely insane.
- bspammer 1y ago
  A fair comparison would include the cost of the DBA who will be responsible for backups, updates, monitoring, security and access control. That’s what RDS is actually competing with.
  - matt-p 1y ago
    Totally. My frustration isn't even price though RDS is literally just dog slow.
  - shrubble 1y ago
    Paying someone $2000 to set that up once should result in the costs being recovered in what, 18 months? If you’re running Postgres locally you can turn off the TCP/IP part; nothing more to audit there. SSH based copying of backups to a remote server is simple. If not accessible via network, you can stay on whatever version of Postgres you want. I’ve heard these arguments since AWS launched, and all that time I’ve been running Postgres (since 2004 actually) and have never encountered all these phantom issues that are claimed as being expensive or extremely difficult.
    - applied_heat 1y ago

themafia 1y ago

On AWS if you want raw computational capacity you use Lambda and not EC2. EC2 is for legacy type workloads and doesn't have nearly the same scaling power and speed that Lambda does. I have several workloads that just invoke Lambda in parallel. Now I effectively have a 1000 core machine and can blast through large workloads without even thinking about it. I have no VM to maintain or OS image to consider or worry about. Which highlights the other difference that you failed to mention. Hertzner charges a "one time setup" fee to create that VM. That puts a lot of back pressure on infrastructure decisions and removes any scalability you could otherwise enjoy in the cloud. If you want to just rent a server then Hertzner is great. If you actually want to run "in the cloud" then Hertzner is a non-starter.

matt-p 1y ago
Very few providers charge setup, some will provision a server within a 90s of an api call.
- themafia 1y ago
  Hertzner does on the server the OP was referencing: https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ax162-s/ https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ax162-s/
  - matt-p 1y ago
    I don't think that negates the point I was making. Most don't, for example none of the providers on https://www.serversearcher.com/ https://www.serversearcher.com/ seem to charge setup.
  - Aeolun 1y ago
    If you are scared off by the €80 setup on a server that costs €200 a month, it seems like the setup fee did its intended job no?
  - ferngodfather 1y ago
    Most providers do for dedicated servers, or make you agree to a fixed term. I don't believe they do the same for VPS / Cloud servers.

ldoughty 1y ago

I agree that AWS EC2 is probably too expensive on the whole. It also doesn't really provide any of the greater benefits of the cloud that come from "someone else's server". However, to the point of microservices as the article mentions, you probably should look at lambda (or fargate, or a mix) unless you can really saturate the capacity of multiple servers. When we swapped to ECS+EC2 running microservices over to lambda our costs dropped sharply. Even serving millions of requests a day we spend a lot of time in between idle, especially spread across the services. Additionally, we have 0 outages now from hardware in the last 5 years. As an engineer, this has made my QoL significantly better.

jgalt212 1y ago
> I agree that AWS EC2 is probably too expensive on the whole. Probably? It's about 5-10X more expensive than equivalent services from Hetzner.

Spooky23 1y ago

It really depends on what you are doing. But when you factor the network features, the ability to scale the solution, etc you get alot of stuff inside that $200/mo EC2 device. The product is more than the VM. That said, with a defined workload without a ton of variation or segmentation needs there are lots of ways to deliver a cheaper solution.

troupo 1y ago
> you get alot of stuff inside that $200/mo EC2 device. The product is more than the VM. What are you getting, and do you need it?
- throwaway7783 1y ago
  Probably not for $200/mo EC2, but AWS/GCP in general * Centralized logging, log search, log based alerting * Secrets manager * Managed kubernetes * Object store * Managed load balancers * Database HA * Cache solutions ... Can I run all these by myself? Sure. But I'm not in this business. I just want to write software and run that. And yes, I have needed most of this from day 1 for my startup. For a personal toy project, or when you reach a certain scale, it may makes sense to go the other way. U
  - ozozozd 1y ago
    You need database HA and load balancers on day 1? You must be doing truly a lot of growth prior to building. Or perhaps insisting on tiny VMs for your loads?
    - swiftcoder 1y ago
      > Or perhaps insisting on tiny VMs for your loads? This happens way too often. Early-stage startups that build everything on the AWS free tier (t2.micro only!), and then when the time comes they scale everything horizontally
      - 1y ago

cedws 1y ago

I don’t disagree but “cores” is not a good measure of computational power.

christophilus 1y ago
True, but the cores on a dedicated Hetzner box obliterate the cores on an EC2 machine every time I’ve tested them. So, if anything, it understates the massive performance gap.
- andersmurphy 1y ago
  Hetzner also tends to have more modern SSDs with the latest nvme. Which can make a massive difference for your DB.
  - Nextgrid 1y ago
    It's less about the modernity of SSDs and more about a fundamental difference: all persistent storage on AWS is actually networked - it's exposed to you as NVME but it's actually on a SAN and all IO requests go over the network. You can get actual direct-attached SSDs on EC2 (and I'd expect performance to be on-par with Hetzner), but those are ephemeral and you lose them on reboot.
    - andersmurphy 1y ago
      Wow, that's crazy, I was wondering why the numbers I were seeing on AWS were so much worse. I assumed it was the drive modernity. But network makes a lot more sense. Thanks for the insight!

t_mahmood 1y ago

I don't get why people are so hell-bent on going to AWS, for the most minor applications, without looking at simpler options! I am not even thousands km near the level of what you are doing, but my client was paying $100/m for an AWS server, SQS and S3 bucket, for a small PHP based web application that uses Amazon Seller API, Keepa API for the products he ships. Used MySQL for data storage. I implemented the whole thing in Python, Django, and PostgreSQL (initially used SQLite) put it in a $25/m unmanaged VPS. I have not got any complaints about performance, and it's running continuously updating product prices, details, processing PDF invoices using OCR, finding missing products in shipments, while also serving the website, and a 4 core server with 6GB RAM is handling it just fine. The load is not going to be so high to require AWS and friends, for now. It's a small internal app, probably won't even get over 100 users, and if it ever does, it's extremely simple to migrate, because the app is so compact, even though not exactly monolithic. And still, it probably won't need a $100 AWS server, unless we are scaling up much larger.

3shv 1y ago
What are some cheaper and better hosting providers that you can recommend?
- ferngodfather 1y ago
  Hetzner! They do ask for ID though.
- benterix 1y ago
  Hetzner. For most public cloud providers you have to give them your credit card number so they can charge an arbitrary amount. For Hetzner, instead of CC#, you give a scan of your ID (of course you can attach your CC too or Paypal). Personally I do my payments via a bank transfer. I recently paid for the whole 2025 and 2026 for all my k8s clusters. It gives unimaginable peace of mind when compared to AWS/GCP/Azure. Plus, their cloud instances often spin up much faster than EC2.
- t_mahmood 1y ago
  I have used Knownhost previously, it served me really well. Before that, I used to go for Linode, but I think they've become more pricey?

benjiro 1y ago

> At Hetzner, you can rent a machine with 48 cores and 128GB of RAM for the same money. The problem that Hetzner and a lot of hardware providing hosts have, is the lack of affordable flexibility. Hetzner their design is based upon a base range of standardized products. This can only be upgraded within a pre-approved range of upgrade options (limited to storage/memory). Upgrades are often a mixed bag of carefully designed "upgrade paths". As you can expect, upgrades are not cheap. Doubling the storage on a base server, often increases the price of your server by 50 to 75%. The typical customizing will cost you dearly. This is where AWS wins a lot more. Yes, they are expensive as hell, but you often are not stuck to a base config and a limited upgrade path. The ability to scale beyond what Hetzner can offer is there, and your not forced to overbuy from the start. Transferring between servers is a few buttons and done. With Hetzner, if you did not overspec from the start, your going to do those fun server migrations. The ironic part is, that buying your own hardware and running it yourself, often ends up paying back within a 8~12 month periode (not counting electricity / internet). And you maintain a lot more flexibility. * You want to use bifurcation, go for it. * You want to use consumer 4TB nvme's for second layer read storage (what hetzner refuses to offer as they limited those to 2TB and only one a few servers), go for it. * You want a 10Gbit interlink between your server, go for it. No need to pay a monthly fee! No need to reserve "future space". * O, you want a 25Gbit, go for it (hetzner = not possible). * You want 50Gbit ... * You want to chuck in a few LLM capable GPUs without breaking the bank... Its ironic that we are 2025 and Hetzner is stil limited to 1Gbit connection on its hardware, when just about any consumer level hardware has 2.5Gbit by default for years. Your own hardware gives you the flexibility of AWS and the cost saving beyond Hetzner. Maybe its just my environment, but i see more and more smaller to medium companies going back to their own locally run servers. Not even colocation. The increase in consumer level fiber, what used to be expensive or not available, has opened the doors for businesses. Most companies do not need insane backbones. The fact that you can get business fiber 10Gbit for a 100 Euro price in some EU countries (of course never the north), is insane. I even seen some folks combining fiber with starlink & 5G as backup in case their fiber fails/is out. As long as you fit within a specific usage case that is being offered by Hetzner, they are cheap. But its the moment you step outside that comfort zone, ... This is one of Hetzner weaknesses and where AWS or Self hosted comes back.

1y ago

benreesman 1y ago

In 2025 if you need convenience and no red tape you've got fly.io in the general case and maybe Vercel or something on a particular framework (there are some good ones for a particular stack). If your needs go beyond that? Then you need real computers with real configuration and you have OVH/Hetzner/Latitude who will rent you MONSTER machines for the cost of some cheap-ass surplus 2017 Intel on The Cloud. And if you just want a blog or whatever? Zillion VPS options. The traditional cloud is for regulatory/process/corruption capture extraction in 2025: its machine economics and developer productivity use case is fucking zero I've seen. Maybe there's some edge case where a completely unencumbered team is better off with DMV trip permissions theatre, remnant Intel racked with noisy neighbors at massive markup, and no support recourse.

nine_k 1y ago
(1) How does fly.io reliability compare to AWS, GCP, or maybe Linode or DO? (2) What do you do if your large Hetzner server starts to show signs of malfunction? How soon would you be able to replace it, and how easily? (2a) What do you do when your large Hetzner server just dies? I see that this happens rarely, but what's your contingency plan, if any? (3) What do you do when your load is highly spiky? Do you reserve bare metal capacity for the biggest peak you expect to serve, because it's so much cheaper than running an elastic serverless architecture of the same capacity anyway? (4) Considering that your stack still includes many components, how do you manage them, and how expensive is the management overhead? Do you need an extra SRE? These are not rhetorical questions; I'd love to hear firm real practitioners! (E.g. Stack Overflow used to do deep dives into their few-big-servers architecture.)
- runako 1y ago
  These are great questions. A key factor underlining all of this is understanding, from a business/organizational perspective, your actual uptime requirements. Google may aim at 5 nines with the budget to achieve it, but many banks have routine planned downtime. If you don't know your objectives, you will have trouble making the tradeoffs necessary to get there. As a hypothetical, would your business choose 99.999% uptime (26 seconds down on average per month) vs 99.99% (4.3 min) if that caused infra costs to rise by 50% or more? If you said we can cut our infra costs by 50% by planning a short weekly maintenance window, how would that resonate? Speaking to a few, in my experience: 2) (not at Hetzner specifically, but at a dedicated host). You have backups & recovery plans, and redundancy where it makes sense. You might run your database with a replica. If you are serving Web traffic, maybe you keep a hot spare. Also, you are still allowed to use e.g. cloud services if it makes sense to do so so you can backup to S3 and use things like SQS or KMS if you don't want to run them yourself. It's worth noting that you may not get advance notice; I recall our service being impacted by a fire at a datacenter that IIRC was caused by a traffic accident on a nearby highway. The point is you have to design resilience into the system. Fortunately, this is well-trod ground. It would not be a terrible failover option to have something like an autoscale group at AWS ready to step in if the dedicated cluster goes offline. Keep that cluster scaled to 0 until it's needed. Put the cloud behind your cheap dedicated capacity. 3) See above. In my case, we over-provisioned because it's cheap to do so. I did not do this at the time, but I would probably look at running a replicated database with a hot standby on another server. 4) It has not been my experience that "modern" cloud deployments require fewer SRE resources. Like water running downhill, cloud projects seek complexity.

cnst 1y ago

> types of solutions engineers even consider I think the issue is actually the opposite. With the cloud, the engineers fail to see the actual cost of their inefficient scaled-out code, because someone else (the CFO) pays the bill; and the answer to any issue, is simply adding more "workers" and more "cloud", since they're basically "free" from the perspective of the employee. (And the more "cloud" something is, like, the serverless, the more "free", completely inverting the economics of making a profit on the service — when the CFO tells you that your AWS bill is too high, you move everything from the EC2 to AWS Lambda, since the salesperson from AWS tells you that serverless is far cheaper, only for the bill to get even higher, for reasons unknown, of course.) Whom the cloud tax actually constrains are the entrepreneurs and solo-preneurs. If you have to pay $5000/mo to AWS just for the infra, you can only go so long without lots of revenue, and you'd need to have a whopping 5k/mo+ worth of revenue before breaking even. Yet with a $200/mo like at OVH or Hetzner, you can afford to let it grow at negligible cost to yourself, and it can basically start being profitable with the first few users. Don't believe this? Look at the blog entries by the guy who bought Yahoo!'s Delicious, written before they went bankrupt and were up for sale. He was basically pointing out that the services have roughly the same number of users, and require the same engineering resources, yet one is being operated at a loss, whereas the other one makes a profit (guess which one, and guess why). * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website) * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinboard_(website) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinboard_(website) * https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=blog.pinboard.in https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=blog.pinboard.in So, literally, the difference between the cloud and renting One Big Server, is making a loss and going out of business, and remaining in business and purchasing your underwater competitor for pennies on the dollar.