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Not surprised to see this, although I am surprised more companies aren't following suit. We abandoned AWS a year and a half ago and cut our server / infrastruct

Not surprised to see this, although I am surprised more companies aren't following suit. We abandoned AWS a year and a half ago and cut our server / infrastructure costs by 90% in the process.

wahnfrieden 13y ago
Care to share more details? Which services were you using? Most everything reserved? Were you taking advantage of auto scaling / was your traffic very elastic? Do you have as much redundancy in your new host / do you have redundancy requirements?
- rgrieselhuber 13y ago
  We were using EC2 and RDS (we still use S3 quite a bit). Nothing reserved because we never wanted to be tied to the platform for long, although we ended up staying on longer than I wanted to due to difficulties in migrating away. Yes, I realize we could have saved a lot with longer contracts. But the costs would still have been much higher than what we're paying now. RDS crashed (completely) for us 2 years in a row, on exactly July 4th. We never got a straight answer from Amazon and their support system is a nightmare. Performance was always an issue. Our main servers are now hosted on Hetzner (surprisingly). We've had issues here and there with individual machine performance but nothing catastrophic and their customer service has been good. For redundancy, we replicate back to the US onto Rackspace (and small EC2 instances for additional redundancy) servers and can switch over completely if need be. We were worried that latency (because servers are in Germany) would be an issue but it hasn't. Also, in addition to US customers, we have a lot of customers in Japan so it doesn't seem to make much difference. It's probably not for everybody and it's certainly not "cool" but it's worked very well for us. Edit: our needs are relatively inelastic, which obviously makes AWS a poor choice to begin with. That was something we learned a little later in life as a startup.
taf2 13y ago
who did you migrate to?
erichate 13y ago
Yes, more specifics would be nice.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
ballard 13y ago
Yup. Folks like Netflix and Zynga are showing off how much money they are willing to spend for more potential agility. They could save a ton for predictable capacity by deploying dedicated boxes + openstack. That's where the savings are obvious, because AWS is like living at a hotel.
- dagw 13y ago
  You're assuming Netflix and Zynga are paying the prices that are published on the webpage. I'm fairly confidant that that isn't the case.
- travem 13y ago
  Zynga are actually "well known" for having a hybrid model and running the steady state games on their private cloud - http://wikibon.org/wiki/v/Zynga_Cloud_Case_Study:_The_journey_to_a_real_private_cloud http://wikibon.org/wiki/v/Zynga_Cloud_Case_Study:_The_journe...

Not surprised to see this, although I am surprised more companies aren't following suit. We abandoned AWS a year and a half ago and cut our server / infrastructure costs by 90% in the process.

wahnfrieden 13y ago

Care to share more details? Which services were you using? Most everything reserved? Were you taking advantage of auto scaling / was your traffic very elastic? Do you have as much redundancy in your new host / do you have redundancy requirements?

rgrieselhuber 13y ago
We were using EC2 and RDS (we still use S3 quite a bit). Nothing reserved because we never wanted to be tied to the platform for long, although we ended up staying on longer than I wanted to due to difficulties in migrating away. Yes, I realize we could have saved a lot with longer contracts. But the costs would still have been much higher than what we're paying now. RDS crashed (completely) for us 2 years in a row, on exactly July 4th. We never got a straight answer from Amazon and their support system is a nightmare. Performance was always an issue. Our main servers are now hosted on Hetzner (surprisingly). We've had issues here and there with individual machine performance but nothing catastrophic and their customer service has been good. For redundancy, we replicate back to the US onto Rackspace (and small EC2 instances for additional redundancy) servers and can switch over completely if need be. We were worried that latency (because servers are in Germany) would be an issue but it hasn't. Also, in addition to US customers, we have a lot of customers in Japan so it doesn't seem to make much difference. It's probably not for everybody and it's certainly not "cool" but it's worked very well for us. Edit: our needs are relatively inelastic, which obviously makes AWS a poor choice to begin with. That was something we learned a little later in life as a startup.

taf2 13y ago

who did you migrate to?

erichate 13y ago

Yes, more specifics would be nice.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

ballard 13y ago

Yup. Folks like Netflix and Zynga are showing off how much money they are willing to spend for more potential agility. They could save a ton for predictable capacity by deploying dedicated boxes + openstack. That's where the savings are obvious, because AWS is like living at a hotel.

dagw 13y ago
You're assuming Netflix and Zynga are paying the prices that are published on the webpage. I'm fairly confidant that that isn't the case.
travem 13y ago
Zynga are actually "well known" for having a hybrid model and running the steady state games on their private cloud - http://wikibon.org/wiki/v/Zynga_Cloud_Case_Study:_The_journey_to_a_real_private_cloud http://wikibon.org/wiki/v/Zynga_Cloud_Case_Study:_The_journe...