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AWS is 10x slower than a dedicated server for the same price [video]
- typpilol 10mo agoI hate these comparisons because it's not apples to apples. The entire point of AWS is so you don't have to get a dedicated server. It's infra as a service.
- hshdhdhj4444 10mo agoI don’t understand your complaint. The point of having a private chef is so you don’t have to cook food by yourself. It’s still extremely useful to know if the private chef is cheaper or more expensive than cooking by yourself and by how much, so you can make a decision more aware of the trade offs involved.
- troupo 10mo agoMy feeling is that a more apt comparison would be "cooking yourself vs. ordering Doordash all the time" (aka "a taxi for your burrito)
- hshdhdhj4444 10mo agoSure, that might be a more appropriate comparison. The key point is that being aware of the cost trade off is useful.
- raverbashing 10mo agoYes Getting a chef would be hiring your own devops team But the point of AWS is that you can buy these services with very fine granularity
- DeathArrow 10mo ago>The point of having a private chef is so you don’t have to cook food by yourself. With cloud, you hire a private chef and ALSO have to cook the food by yourself. You don't hire a team to maintain the server infrastructure, but you hire a team to maintain cloud infrastructure.
- whstl 10mo agoThe problem with this discussion is that a lot of people on these threads work as overpaid assistants to the one private chef, but also have never cooked at home. Translating: A lot of people work with AWS, are making bank, and are terrified of their skill set being made obsolete. They also have no idea what it means to use a dedicated server. That’s why we get the same tired arguments and assumptions (such as the belief that bare-metal means “server room here in the office”) in every discussion.
- ElFitz 10mo ago> such as the belief that bare-metal means “server room here in the office” I remember the day I discovered some companies, and not just tech ones (Walmart, UPS, Toyota,…) actually own, operate, and use their own datacenters. And there companies out there specialized in planning and building datacenters for them. I mean, it’s kind of obvious. But it made me realize at how small a scale I both thought and operated.
- water-your-self 10mo agoWalmart does not want to use AWS because they are in direct competition. I worked for a company that was attempting to sell software to walmart.
- ElFitz 10mo agoYes, but if that was the only rationale, couldn’t they have opted for GCP or Azure?
- flipbrad 10mo agoCheck out how Wikipedia and the rest of the wikimedia universe is run.
- refulgentis 10mo agoOne of the least insightful comments I’ve seen in my 16 years here. “it’s because everyone here is dumb and knows it, and they are panicking and lying because they don’t want you to blow up their scam.”
- _nhh 10mo agoHavibg a private chef is more like havibg hired people to manage your own hardware. Doordash is aws
- dacryn 10mo agoit's not interesting as a standalone question indeed. The question is, what do you enable by having a private chef? Is it the fact that you don't want to spend the time cooking? or is it cooking plus shopping plus cleaning up after? Or is it counting the time to take cooking lessons? and including the cost of taking the bus to those cooking lessons? Does the private chef even use your house, or their own kitchen? Or can you get a smaller house without a kitchen alltogether? Especially at the rate of kitchen improvement, where kitchens don't last 20 years anymore, you're gonna need a new kitchen every 5 years. (granted the analogy is starting to fail here, but you get my point) Big companies have been terrible at managing costs and attributing value. At least with cloud the costs are somewhat clear. Also, finding staff that is skilled is a considerable expense for businesses with a more than a few pieces of code, and takes time, you can't just get them on a whim and get rid of them.
- littlestymaar 10mo ago> The entire point of AWS is so you don't have to get a dedicated server. Yet every company I've worked for still used at least a bunch of AWS VPS exactly as they would have used dedicated servers, just for ten times the cost.
- Perz1val 10mo agoThen why does EC2 exist?
- danpalmer 10mo agoS3 is also 10x more expensive than this single consumer grade second hand hard drive I have. Managed NAT gateways are also 10000x more expensive than my router. This is a boring argument that has been done to death.
- dainiusse 10mo ago"AWS inflation"
- oersted 10mo agoAs a CTO of a number of small startups, I am still struggling to understand what exactly AWS and other cloud providers give you to justify the markup. And yes we’ve been heavy users of both AWS and Google Cloud for years, mainly because of the credits they initially provided, but also used VMs, dedicated servers and other services from Hetzner and OVH extensively. In my experience, in terms of availability and security there’s not much difference in practice. There are tons of good tools nowadays to treat a physical server or a cluster of them as a cloud or a PaaS, it’s not really more work or responsibility, often it is actually simpler depending on the setup you choose. Most workloads do not require flexible compute capability and it’s also easy and fast to get it from these cheaper providers when you need to. I feel like the industry has collectively accepted that Cloud prices are a cost of doing business and unquestionable, “nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM”. Thinking about costs from first principles is an important part of being an engineer.
- mgaunard 10mo agoWhat AWS gives you is the ability to spin up dozens if not thousands of hosts in a single click. If you run your own hardware, getting stuff shipped to a datacenter and installed is 2 to 4 weeks (and potentially much longer based on how efficient your pipeline is)
- continuational 10mo agoBut on Hetzner, you can usually get a dedicated server installed and ready tomorrow.
- hhh 10mo agonow look at spot instance comparisons
- dev_l1x_be 10mo agoOr reserved capacity instances.
- ozgrakkurt 10mo ago10x sounds way off. Try something with good nvme disks and decent amount of ram. It should be 30x
- ody4242 10mo agoSure, EBS or any network-attached storage is expected to be a lot slower than a local SSD for synchronous writes or random reads, as there is a network stack in between. But my understanding is that for those usecases, you can use metal instances with local nvme. (ephemeral though)
- flibble 10mo agoI do like watching these comparisons however it reminds me of a conversation I had recently with my 10 year old. Son: Why does the croissant cost €2.80 here while it's only €0.45 in Lidl? Who would buy that? Me: You're not paying for the croissant, you're paying for the staff to give it to you, for the warm café, for the tables to be cleaned and for the seat to sit on.
- boxed 10mo agoAWS feels more like Lidl though...
- whstl 10mo agoThe people cleaning and keeping the café warm are your Ops team. AWS is just an extremely expensive Lidl. EDIT: autocorrect typo, coffee to café
- auggierose 10mo agoHe means the location, not the fluid. My coffee better be hot, not warm.
- whstl 10mo agoTypo.
- spwa4 10mo agoExactly. The whole promise behind cloud was "you don't need an ops team". Now go check for yourself if that's true: go to your favorite jobs portal and search for AWS, or to include Azure and Github sysadmins search for "devops engineer". And for laughs search for "IAM engineer", which is a job only about managing permissions for users (not deciding about permissions, JUST managing them and fixing problems, nothing more. And frankly, the cloud is to blame: figuring out correct permissions now requires teams of PhDs to do correctly on infuriating web interfaces. I used to think Active Directory permissions were bad. I was wrong. The job portals show: no corporate department should ever go without a team of IAM engineers who are totally not really sysadmins) What do you get for this? A redundant database without support (because while AWS support really tries so hard to help that I feel bad saying this, they don't get time to debug stuff, and redundant databases are complicated whether or not you use the cloud). You also get S3 distributed storage, and serverless (which is kind of CGI, except using docker and AWS markups to make one of most efficient stateless ways to run code on the web really expensive). Btw: for all of these better open source versions are available as a helm chart, with effectively the same amount of support. You can use vercel to get out from under this, but that only works for small companies' "I need a small website" needs. It cannot do the integration that any even medium sized company requires. Oh, and you get Amazon TLA, which is another brilliant amazon invention: during the time it takes you to write a devops script Amazon TLA comes up with another three-letter AWS service that you now have to use, because one of the devs wants it on his resume, is 2x as expensive as anything else, doesn't solve any problem and you now have to learn. It's all about using AI for maximizing uselessness. And you'll do all this on Amazon's patented 1994-styled webpages because even claude code doesn't understand the AWS CLI. And the GCP and Azure ones are somehow worse (their websites look a lot nicer though, I'll readily admit that. But they're not significantly more functional) Conclusion: while cloud has changed the job of sysadmin somewhat, there is no real difference, other than a massive price increase. Cloud is now so expensive that, for a single month's cloud services, you can buy hardware and put it on your desk. As the youtube points out, even an 8GB M1 mac mini, even a chinese mini-pc with AMD, runs docker far better than the (now reduced to 2GB memory) standard cloud images.
- jwr 10mo agoI measured this years ago: https://jan.rychter.com/enblog/cloud-server-cpu-performance-comparison-2019-12-12 https://jan.rychter.com/enblog/cloud-server-cpu-performance-...
- 3ds 10mo agoWhy is this a video? I'm not going to watch it. I will read the AI summary of the transcript though: The video argues that AWS is dramatically overpriced and underpowered compared to cheap VPS or dedicated servers. Using Sysbench benchmarks, the creator shows that a low-cost VPS outperforms AWS EC2 and ECS by large margins (EC2 has ~20% of the VPS’s CPU performance while costing 3× more; ECS costs 6× more with only modest improvements). ECS setup is also complicated and inconsistent. Dedicated servers offer about 10× the performance of similarly priced AWS options. The conclusion: most apps don’t need cloud-scale architecture, and cloud dominance comes from marketing—not superior value or performance.
- Mashimo 10mo ago> Why is this a video? I'm not going to watch it. There have also been a couple of thread in text based form about the same topic. Some like text, some like video.
- spwa4 10mo agoDidn't even mention the difference in data costs, or S3 plus transfer, because then we'll be going into 2-orders-of-magnitude differences ... Not to mention what happens when you pay per megabyte and someone ddos-es you. Cloud brought back almost all hosting antipatterns, and means denial-of-service attacks really should be renamed denial-of-wallet attacks. And leaving a single S3 bucket, a single Serverless function, a single ... available (not even open) makes you vulnerable if someone knows of figures out the URL.
- dwedge 10mo agoOr the difference in effort predicting those costs
- woolion 10mo agoI'm migrating my last AWS services to dedicated servers with Gitops. In principle, AWS give you a few benefits that are worth paying for. In practice, I have seen all of them to be massive issues. Price and performance are obviously bad. More annoying than that, their systems have arbitrary limitations that you may not be aware of because they're considered 'corner cases' -- e.g. my small use-case bumped against DNS limitation and the streaming of replies was not supported. Then, you have a fairly steep learning curve with their products and their configuration DSLs. There are Gitops solution that give you all the benefits that are promised by it, without any of the downsides or compromises. You just have to bite the bullet and learn kubernetes. It may be a bit more of a learning curve, but in my experience I would say not by much. And you have much more flexibility in the precise tech stack that you choose, so you can reduce it by using stuff you're already know well.
- mgaunard 10mo agoPricing in AWS is heavily dependent on whether you reserve the instance and for how long. In my experience, if you reserve a bare metal instance for 3 years (which is the biggest discount), it costs 2 times the price of buying it outright. I'm surprised to hear about the numbers from the video being way different, but then, it's a video, so I didn't watch it and can't tell if he did use the correct pricing.
- parchley 10mo agoYou seem to insinuate that the correct pricing is using a 3 year commitment. That seems very much not logical to me considering the original promise of the cloud to be flexible, and to scale up and down on demand.
- hhh 10mo agoShould you be designing for a single server to exist for 3 years when you have such elastic compute? Why not design for living on spot instances and get savings lower than hetzner with better performance? What about floating savings plans? There’s a ton left on the table here just to say ‘aws bad’ for some views
- tstrimple 10mo agoThe biggest cloud detractors are often the most ignorant about how to run things effectively in the cloud. They try to use the same patterns that they have used for the last 20 years on-prem and are all confused as to why it's more expensive. It's the exact same tired arguments over and over again. They don't want to learn how to do things in a new way.
- mgaunard 10mo agoElasticity is very expensive, in practice people only use it for one-off jobs, preferably using the cheaper unreliable "spot" instances (meaning the job must support being partially re-run to recover, which implies a complex job splitting and batching platform). For traditional, always-on servers, you should reserve them for 3 years. You still have the ability to scale up, just not down. You can always go hybrid if you don't know what your baseline usage is.
- paranoidrobot 10mo agoI'm struggling to find a way to express my opinion about this video without seeming like a complete ass. If the author's point was to make a low effort "ha ha AWS sucks" video, well sure: success, I guess. Nobody outside of AWS sales is going to say AWS is cheaper. But comparing the lowest end instances, and apparently, using ECS without seeming to understand how they're configuring or using it just makes their points about it being slower kind of useless. Yes you got some instances that were 5-10x slower than Hetzner. On it's own that's not particularly useful. I thought, going in, that this was going to be along the lines of others I have seen, previously: you can generally get a reasonably beefy machine with a bunch of memory and local SSDs that will come in half or less the cost of a similar spec EC2 instance. That would've been a reasonable path to go. Add on that you don't have issues with noisy neighbors when running a dedicated box, and yeah - something people can learn from. But this... Yeah. Nah. Sorry Maybe try again but get some help speccing out the comparison configuration from folks who do have experience in this. Unfortunately it will cost more to do a proper comparison with mid-range hardware.
- Pooge 10mo agoWhat is the point you are trying to make? Are you saying that we would need to have someone on payroll to have a usable machine? Then why not just have... a SysAdmin? Shared instances is something even European "cloud" providers can do so why is EC2 so much more expensive and slower?
- jfim 10mo agoBecause people aren't going on AWS for EC2, they go on it to have access to RDS, S3, EKS, ELB, SNS, Cognito, etc. Large enough customers also don't pay list price for AWS.
- graemep 10mo agoA lot of people do use AWS for EC2. Of the services you list, S3 is OK. I would rather admin an RDBMS than use RDS at small scale > Large enough customers also don't pay list price for AWS. At that scale the cost savings on not hiring sysadmins becomes much smaller, so what is the case for using AWS? The absolute cost savings will be huge.
- jdjsjhsgsgh 10mo agoI mean yeah they say that 1 vCPU == 1 hyper thread which is 10% of a CPU.
- jdjsjhsgsgh 10mo agoAtleast this is what they said years ago
- jonathanstrange 10mo agoThis is always an unfair comparison because for any realistic comparison you need to have two servers on two locations for georedundancy and need to pay for the premises and their physical security, too. For example, you need to pay for security locks with access log and a commercial security company, or you have to pay for co-location in a datacenter. When you add up all these costs plus the electricity bill, I wager that many cloud providers are on the cheaper side due to the economy of scale. I'd be interested in such a more detailed comparison for various locations / setups vs cloud providers. What almost never goes into this discussion, however, is the expertise and infrastructure you lose when you put your servers into the cloud. Your own servers and their infrastructure are MOAT that can be sold as various products if needed. In contrast, relying on a cloud provider is mostly an additional dependency.
- mgaunard 10mo agoA high-density cabinet in a datacenter costs $4k at most, including power and bandwidth. That's nothing compared to an average AWS bill.
- whstl 10mo ago> you need to have two servers on two locations for georedundancy You also absolutely need this with EC2 instances, which is what the comparison was about. So no, it's not unfair. If you're using an AWS service built on top of EC2, Fargate, or anything else, you WILL see the same costs (on top of the extremely expensive Ops engineer you hire to do it, of course). > need to pay for the premises and their physical security, too [...] plus the electricity bill ...and all of this is included in the Hetzner service. Once again comments conflating "dedicated server" with "co-location".
- jonathanstrange 10mo agoAWS counts as managed servers with constant security monitoring. That's a huge difference to paying for a dedicated server where you're responsible for the installation and maintenance of the operating system and all software, intrusion detection and thread responses, and server monitoring. I am a Hetzner customer for my forthcoming small company in order to keep running costs low, but it's not as if companies using AWS were irrational. You get what you pay for.
- jmaker 10mo agoI’ve come to believe that such comparisons usually come from people who don’t understand the trade-offs of AWS in production. Each project has certainly its own requirements. If you have the manpower and a backup plan with blue/green for every infrastructure component, then absolutely harness that cost margin of yours. If it’s at a break even when you factor in specialist continuity - training folks so nothing’s down if your hardware breaks, then AWS wins. If your project can tolerate downtime and your SREs may sleep at night, then you might profit less from the several niners HA SLOs that AWS guarantees. It’s very hard and costly to replicate what AWS gives you if you have requirements close to enterprise levels. Also, the usual argument goes - when you’re a startup you’ll be happy to trade CAPEX for OPEX. For an average hobby project maybe not the best option. As for latency, you can get just as good. Major exchanges run their matching engines in AWS DCs, you can co-locate.
- adamcharnock 10mo agoThis is exactly true, and is something we have built our business around. In fact, I just kicked-off a multi-TiB Postgres migration for one of our clients this morning. We're moving them out of Supabase and onto a bare-metal multi-AZ Postgresql cluster in Hetzner. I'm going to say what I always say here - for so many SME's the hyperscaler cloud provider has been the safe default choice. But as time goes on a few things can begin to happen. Firstly, the bills grow in both size and variability, so CFOs start to look increasingly askance at the situation. Secondly, so many technical issues start to arise that would simply vanish on fixed-size bare-metal (and the new issues that arise are well addressed by existing tooling). So the DevOps team can find themselves firefighting while the backlog keeps growing. The problem really is one of skills and staffing. The people who have both the skills and desire actually implement and maintain the above tend to be the greying-beards who were installing RedHat 6 in their bedrooms as teenagers (myself included). And there are increasingly few of us who are not either in management and/or employed by the cloud providers. So if companies can find the staff and the risk appetite, they can go right ahead and realise something like a 90% saving on their current spend. But that is unusual for an SME. So we started Lithus[0] to do this for SMEs. We _only_ offer a 50% saving, not 90%. But take on all the risk and staffing issues. We don't charge for the migration, and the billing cycle only starts once migration is complete. And we provide a fixed number of engineering days per month included. So you get a complete Kubernetes cluster with open source tooling, and a bunch of RedHat-6-installing greying-beards to use however you need. /pitch [0] https://lithus.eu https://lithus.eu
- h_ko 10mo agoJust curious: Did you move to self-hosted Supabase? Or migrated to the underlying OSS equivalents for each feature/service? I find Supabase immensely helpful to minimize overhead in the beginning, but would love to better understand where it starts breaking and how hard an eventual migration would be.
- adamcharnock 10mo agoIn this particular case the only need was for Postgres migration, no other services needed. The problems we've seen or heard about with Supabase are: * Cost (in either magnitude or variability). Either from usage, or having to go onto their Enterprise-tier pricing for one reason or another * The usual intractable cloud-oddities – dropped connections, performance speed-bumps * Increased network latency (just the way it goes when data has to cross a network fabric. Its fast, but not as fast as your own private network) * Scaling events tend not to be as smooth as one would hope None of these are unique to Supabase though, they can simply all arise naturally from building infrastructure on a cloud platform. Regarding self-hosted Supabase - we're certainly open to deploying this for our clients, we've been experimenting with it internally. Happy to chat with you or anyone who's interested. Email is adam@ company domain.
- willtemperley 10mo agoThis all depends on the use-case. For example, if the service is using a massive dataset hosted on AWS such as Sentinel 2 satellite imagery, then the bandwidth and egress costs will be the driving factors.
- ojr 10mo agocompare the worldwide latency, I released an app in the App Store, I got users from Japan to Saudi Arabia to the United States. AWS basically guarantees to reach anyone who speaks English low latency.
- mrtksn 10mo agoIIRC, when the cloud services were taking over the argument was that it’s much cheaper to pay for the AWS than paying engineers to handle the servers. This was also a popular argument for running an unoptimized code(i.e. it’s much cheaper to run two servers instead of making your code twice as fast). Since the industry has matured now, there must be a lot of opportunity to optimize code and run it on bare metal to make systems dramatically faster and dramatically cheaper. If you think about it, the algorithms that we run to deliver products are actually not that complicated and most of the code is about accommodating developers with layers upon layers of abstraction.
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- Meekro 10mo agoWhen you're a solo SaaS developer/company owner, the dedicated server option really shines. I get a 10x lower price and no downsides that I've ever seen. "But are your database backups okay?" Yeah, I coded the backup.sh script and confirmed that it works. The daily job will kick up a warning if it ever fails to run. "But don't you need to learn Linux stuff to configure it?" Yeah, but I already know that stuff, and even if I didn't, it's probably easier to learn than AWS's interfaces. "But what if it breaks and you have to debug it?" Good luck debugging an AWS lambda job that won't run or something; your own hardware is way more transparent than someone else's cloud. "But don't you need reproducible configurations checked into git?" I have a setup.sh script that starts with a vanilla Ubuntu LTS box, and transforms it into a fully-working setup with everything deployed. That's the reproducible config. When it's time to upgrade to the next LTS release (every 4 years or so), I just provision a new machine and run that script again. It'll probably fail on first try because some ubuntu package name changed slightly, but that's a 5-minute fix. "But what about scaling?" One of my crazy-fast dedicated machines is equal to ~10 of your slow-ass VPSes. If my product is so successful that this isn't enough, that's a good problem to have. Maybe a second dedicated machine, plus a load balancer, would be enough? If my product gets so popular that I'm thinking about hundreds of dedicated machines, then hopefully I have a team to help me with that.
- enronmusk 10mo agoAlthough the video is correct in the sense that AWS is vastly overpriced compared to most other cloud/VPS providers, the title is wrong: OP is not using a dedicated server (see 2:40 of the video) -- he is using a shared VPS. Hetzner sell proper dedicated servers, whether bare metal or virtualized. I believe their bare metal servers should have even better price/perf ratio, but I don't have data to back that up.
- bast0000 10mo agoThis thing is due do vCPU overcommitting no ? AWS vCPU migth be a 1/8 of thread Hetzner 1/1 of thread
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- perrohunter 10mo agoI suspect Hetzner has the latest CPU generation and AWS is giving you something they bought 10+ years ago, so it wouldn't be a fair comparisson unless he selects something that guarantees the CPU generation