9 ms·

Which is less expensive: Amazon or self-hosted?

46 points by sadtaf 13y ago

bbrunner 13y ago
I'd like to see this same sort of thing done with updates for the lower 2014 pricing and in either the US West Oregon Region or the US East Region instead of Northern California. NorCal is roughly 10% more costly for many instance types. Edit: And a little more attention paid to cost of maintenance and outages, which does factor into the decision of self-hosted vs AWS quite heavily. This article sort of does some hand-waving to get away from it, but it is an important consideration.
pavlov 13y ago
Article is from February 2012. Does this price comparison reflect today's situation?
- brianwawok 13y ago
  The concept is. The article was pretty actual price light anyway.
- malij 13y ago
  Amazoon has updated AWS pricing list recently, But I think the method which this article introduces is useful generally for estimating server costs.
mgkimsal 13y ago
"Today, instead of simply assuming that you’ll be buying and operating your own servers, storage and networking" umm... I've been leasing dedicated servers since 1999 just fine. Why is all 'cloud' discussion always about AWS vs buying dedicated hardware? The vast middle ground serves most people just fine. EDIT: Actually, I can understand these discussions in some capacity - with large enough orgs, money may come from budget X vs budget Y, and there can be tax implications depending on what option you choose. The majority of people I see/read/hear having these discussions are not at that level though.
- druiid 13y ago
  I'd say the tax portion is actually a huge consideration for many businesses that would be comparing between leasing or buying. If you purchase $100k of hardware or more, that can have a pretty significant tax benefit.
  - mgkimsal 13y ago
    Yes, again, true, but... the majority of people I know that have these discussions, and make these decisions, aren't dealing at anywhere near that level, and start to justify AWS because of a free micro tier vs having to shell out $40/month on a VPS. Again, yes, there can be bigger considerations at play, but I contend it materially impacts far fewer people than think they would be impacted.
  - 727374 13y ago
    You're only getting the tax benefit because you've had to spend 100k to start out with (which you wouldn't have to do when renting from AWS).
angrybits 13y ago
AWS isn't about being cheaper, it's about capital preservation. (Although reserved instances give you an option to make an investment if you choose.)
jlgaddis 13y ago
> ... a bit more than half of the total cost for each alternative is for bandwidth/data transfer charges ($35,144 for self-hosted at $8/Mbps and $36,900 for AWS). If you're buying ~5 Gbps and paying $8/Mbps for it, please please please get in touch with me. I will sell it to you for $6/Mbps and save you 25% off the top! :-)
- druiid 13y ago
  About $5/Mbps here! It seems like you can get some pretty good deals if you find a newish data-center. Internap has been building out like crazy recently and gave us a great deal on bandwidth. I remember the days of potentially hundreds of dollars per Megabit! Edit: Expanded my comment.. this isn't fark.com
  - vonmoltke 13y ago
    I have a single-server colo at a local datacenter here in Dallas[1] for $49 total (with 10Mbps). Same datacenter will give you 2Gbps to a half or full rack for $1900/mo. [1] http://www.colounlimited.com/ http://www.colounlimited.com/
    - waps 13y ago
      At 5 Gbps order size, if you're paying more than $0.9/Mbps you're getting screwed.
skrowl 13y ago
That depends. How much do you feel that outages / lost data cost you? How much is your time worth while managing your own servers & network?
- mgkimsal 13y ago
  Because Amazon has never had outages? It happens to everyone at some point.
  - GotAnyMegadeth 13y ago
    I don't know about Amazon, but Microsoft pays you in credit for Azure when they have outages
    - vonmoltke 13y ago
      I'll feel really good when I get my $500 credit for an outage that cost me $50,000 in business.
      - ents 13y ago
        Not making $50,000 is in no way the same as someone removing $50,000 from your bank account. It's an opportunity cost.
        vonmoltke 13y ago
        "[I]n no way the same"? Either one reduces my profit for the year by $50,000. One comes out of revenue, the other comes out of cash on hand (or increases debt, as the case may be). Yes, there are trade-offs and differing side effects from the situations, but they are similar in their effect on the bottom line. Also, losing $50,000 in business because of a supplier or subcontractor failure is not an opportunity cost.
      - count 13y ago
        Then engineer your cloud provided architecture to be resilient, in the same manner you do so with hardware. At least you get $500 - with an onsite, self-owned infrastructure outage, you lose that $50k...and get nothing but pain and direct blame!
bijbij 13y ago
It is the most ridiculous article I have ever read because it doesn't consider the cost of maintaining and support.
- oijaf888 13y ago
  Who maintains your AWS instances? You still need someone to create AMIs, script updates, destroy stuck machines, etc. The physical cost of maintenance is pretty minimal unless you have a massive deployment or you have really poor hardware. Especially since if you have a few racks at any decent datacenter they will provide basic remote hands support to do things like replace failed drives.
- malij 13y ago
  I agree with you. Sometimes hiring a person for maintaining is more expensive and sometimes is cheaper. It depends on the scale of product.
  - bijbij 13y ago
    It is not just about hiring people there are too many parameters like providing backups and infrastrcture and so many on
    - vonmoltke 13y ago
      And how many of those are significantly different between the two options? Either way, you still need one or more sysadmins, you still need a backup setup. Sure, there are extra maintenance costs associated with owning the hardware, but what portion of maintaining a server infrastructure is tied up specifically in that, and how does it scale relative to the size of the cluster?
      - nasalgoat 13y ago
        In my experience of managing a team of 10+ admins, less than 5% of their time was spent dealing with physical hardware and that includes installation and repair. Today's equipment is very reliable.
jrs235 13y ago
Long term yes, it's cheaper to own than rent/lease. Renting/leasing is often more cash flow friendly in the short/near term (due to not needing large sums of initial investment and [in the U.S.] tax implications of OpEx vs CapEx expenditures) If you're trying to preserve capital in a start-up situation renting/leasing is the way to go until you know what resources you actually need.
- noodle 13y ago
  It's also risk mitigation. You can spin those AWS instances up and down smoothly depending on your needs. You can't get rid of a 1+ year lease agreement, or something that you purchased. Nor is it a good idea to buy/lease more quickly without really thinking about the long-term financials.
  - toomuchtodo 13y ago
    YES. Once the business fundamentals (profitability/cost savings), load profile, and your team's skills can support physical infrastructure, it makes sense to do so. Until then, virtualize!
  - nasalgoat 13y ago
    Unless you're running spot instances, that logic doesn't work.
    - noodle 13y ago
      Could you elaborate on this?
      - nasalgoat 13y ago
        Reserved instances are paid for a full year.
        noodle 13y ago
        1) There's a difference between on-demand and spot instances. 2) Well... yes. My entire premise is based upon not making any long-term leases/purchases, as I stated. Hence, if you bought a 1 year reserved instance, you're doing long-term leasing, and therefore your situation doesn't fall into what I was discussing. So, I'm not sure what your point is.
bfell 13y ago
I think this article does an OK job of outlining parts of the decision tree for cloud vs. self-hosted (while ignoring other options like traditional hosting providers). The other things to consider are staffing and materials costs if maintaining servers in house, DR/business continuity, time value of money depending on how the servers are financed, replacement of aging hardware and operating environments, and differences of how the infrastructure would be built (clustered, load balanced, geographic load balanced, etc.). The reality is cloud providers provide a lot of building blocks for you to use to design infrastructure in a more robust manner but that doesn't mean that other options should be ignored - it’s another decision that depends on the factors laid out in the article and a lot of others that are specific to each organization.
api 13y ago
You also have to take time into account. Self-hosting is going to take a bit more time to coordinate, administrate, and possibly even fiddle with hardware. I'd also like to see a comparison with other cloud providers, since Amazon is rather expensive.
bhaisaab 13y ago
While it may depend on a company's requirements; speaking for the startup I work for -- we use bare-metal servers that give us more bang for the buck and they are cheaper than aws and cloud solutions in general that we've compared (note: we were on Linode in the beginning but are now on SoftLayer)
Spooky23 13y ago
What's the cost of staff who speak AWS lingo and know how to engineer solutions vs. traditional server environments? In our work with private cloud, traditional enterprise data center folks don't seem to grok cloud.
electrograv 13y ago
Another case where self hosting can be much less expensive (by orders of magnitude, in fact) than cloud providers is compute-bottlenecked tasks, e.g. machine learning experiments with huge training sets. A single self-hosted compute server that costs ~$20/month in electricity to run 24/7 would cost over $1500/month from AWS.
- svmegatron 13y ago
  OTOH, you may have to buy the self-hosted server, which could sway the cost calculation back in favor of cloud hosting.
- Xylakant 13y ago
  This may be swayed by the fact that you might have a task that can be run in parallel on multiple machines and then finish in an hour, so that you can then move on. Buying or renting enough capacity and then leaving idle for the remaining time is not an option, but with AWS you can easily spin up 100 instances for an hour and do the computational worth for 4 days of a single machine, then shut them down at no extra cost.
  - vonmoltke 13y ago
    That is the use case that AWS is best for. That is not the use case covered in the article, though. The use case being discussed is that for a cluster of always-on machines with a fairly consistent load. If you have a minimum baseline load on your servers, fulfilling that from AWS, or Azure, or similar services doesn't make financial sense. Colocated (if you don't mind dealing with the hardware) or leased (if you do mind) servers for your baseline load combined with cloud machines for load spikes makes the most sense.
- kayoone 13y ago
  I am totally not convinced by AWS, but to be taken seriously you will have to factor in the initial price of that machine if you make a comparison like that.
mpchlets 13y ago
It seems to me that this post is missing the advantages of Cloud Computing (AWS) and the Cloud Ecosystem. The Cloud is not less expensive than physical servers - it is different and a different beast. You have flexibility and a different toolset, as well the ability to start a new server without procurement. As well, it completely disregards some of the advantages of physical servers, including in-box IO (disk) needs. Clouds have not been good in the past for high-IO apps. As well, you get more control at the expense of flexibility. Overall - the determination of Cloud vs Physical should not be based solely on Price but needs and overall Ecosystem that you want to participate in. Not to mention, as an independent consultant and developer, the ability to spin up a new server to play with any time is invaluable.
jmngomes 13y ago
I don't think "bang for the buck" comparisons are the main issue here. The main advantage of going for AWS (especially) or other cloud provider is flexibility: you shrink and grow your server farms whenever you need to, with little setup/maintenance costs. So, cost savings come, mainly, from not paying for idle/underused hardware. At scale, these can make it cheaper to go cloud rather than self-hosted.
- kayoone 13y ago
  Sounds nice in theory, but how often do you actually need to do that? More often than not, you are still overpaying on AWS vs a simple leased server. Look at what you get for a mere 50 bucks/month http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex40 http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex40 Add 10 to that and you have dual SSDs, no long term contracts and provisioning of new machines within the same day, mostly <2 hours.
  - jmngomes 13y ago
    > "More often than not, you are still overpaying on AWS vs a simple leased server" Sorry, didn't explain myself properly: that's exactly my point. Unless you have enough scale to enjoy the benefits of on-demand shrink/grow, you're better off with offers like the one you posted or even other cloud providers like DO. A good thing about AWS is that it ended up forcing down prices for leased servers.
utopkara 13y ago
There is something wrong about the "Total Costs for Different Data Transit Cost Assumptions". The hybrid cost should not be less than its parts, it could follow the lowest cost line at best.
sehugg 13y ago
I don't see any mention of storage costs in the article. If you're using S3, it's really hard to wean off of it, and using it externally doesn't usually make economic sense because you're paying twice for bandwidth. And if you go to a S3-compatiable service, you miss out on Amazon's cost-saving features like Glacier, lifecycle management etc. Amazon's storage pricing is already pretty competitive: http://www.twinstrata.com/cloud-storage-pricing/ http://www.twinstrata.com/cloud-storage-pricing/
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
pm90 13y ago
Google started with used computers crammed into a Stanford dorm room. Just sayin'...
kayoone 13y ago
At my last startup we were running everything off of AWS but i would not do it again except for some short running toy projects. We ended up paying a few hundred $ per month for a web and db server that were just barely usable in terms of speed. Compare that to a box i can get for EUR 50 over at Hetzner that alone is multiple times faster than the 2 small AWS vms . Need another one ? Will be provisioned in about an hour...don't need an instance anymore ? Cancel it by the end of the month, no long term contracts. Yes there is a one-time fee for setting up a new box, but thats about it. And you don't believe how far you can get with a proper beefy 2, maybe 3 machine setup..For EUR 150 you get power equivalent to spending >1000 on AWS easily. Today AWS to me only makes sense for short term computing projects or something very time limited (eg <4weeks) or if money simply doesn't matter. Everything else is just marketing bla, i still need todo the same setup work on AWS.

46 points by sadtaf 13y ago

I'd like to see this same sort of thing done with updates for the lower 2014 pricing and in either the US West Oregon Region or the US East Region instead of Northern California. NorCal is roughly 10% more costly for many instance types. Edit: And a little more attention paid to cost of maintenance and outages, which does factor into the decision of self-hosted vs AWS quite heavily. This article sort of does some hand-waving to get away from it, but it is an important consideration.

pavlov 13y ago

Article is from February 2012. Does this price comparison reflect today's situation?

brianwawok 13y ago
The concept is. The article was pretty actual price light anyway.
malij 13y ago
Amazoon has updated AWS pricing list recently, But I think the method which this article introduces is useful generally for estimating server costs.

mgkimsal 13y ago

"Today, instead of simply assuming that you’ll be buying and operating your own servers, storage and networking" umm... I've been leasing dedicated servers since 1999 just fine. Why is all 'cloud' discussion always about AWS vs buying dedicated hardware? The vast middle ground serves most people just fine. EDIT: Actually, I can understand these discussions in some capacity - with large enough orgs, money may come from budget X vs budget Y, and there can be tax implications depending on what option you choose. The majority of people I see/read/hear having these discussions are not at that level though.

druiid 13y ago
I'd say the tax portion is actually a huge consideration for many businesses that would be comparing between leasing or buying. If you purchase $100k of hardware or more, that can have a pretty significant tax benefit.
- mgkimsal 13y ago
  Yes, again, true, but... the majority of people I know that have these discussions, and make these decisions, aren't dealing at anywhere near that level, and start to justify AWS because of a free micro tier vs having to shell out $40/month on a VPS. Again, yes, there can be bigger considerations at play, but I contend it materially impacts far fewer people than think they would be impacted.
- 727374 13y ago
  You're only getting the tax benefit because you've had to spend 100k to start out with (which you wouldn't have to do when renting from AWS).

angrybits 13y ago

AWS isn't about being cheaper, it's about capital preservation. (Although reserved instances give you an option to make an investment if you choose.)

jlgaddis 13y ago

> ... a bit more than half of the total cost for each alternative is for bandwidth/data transfer charges ($35,144 for self-hosted at $8/Mbps and $36,900 for AWS). If you're buying ~5 Gbps and paying $8/Mbps for it, please please please get in touch with me. I will sell it to you for $6/Mbps and save you 25% off the top! :-)

druiid 13y ago
About $5/Mbps here! It seems like you can get some pretty good deals if you find a newish data-center. Internap has been building out like crazy recently and gave us a great deal on bandwidth. I remember the days of potentially hundreds of dollars per Megabit! Edit: Expanded my comment.. this isn't fark.com
- vonmoltke 13y ago
  I have a single-server colo at a local datacenter here in Dallas[1] for $49 total (with 10Mbps). Same datacenter will give you 2Gbps to a half or full rack for $1900/mo. [1] http://www.colounlimited.com/ http://www.colounlimited.com/
  - waps 13y ago
    At 5 Gbps order size, if you're paying more than $0.9/Mbps you're getting screwed.

skrowl 13y ago

That depends. How much do you feel that outages / lost data cost you? How much is your time worth while managing your own servers & network?

mgkimsal 13y ago
Because Amazon has never had outages? It happens to everyone at some point.
- GotAnyMegadeth 13y ago
  I don't know about Amazon, but Microsoft pays you in credit for Azure when they have outages
  - vonmoltke 13y ago
    I'll feel really good when I get my $500 credit for an outage that cost me $50,000 in business.
    - ents 13y ago
      Not making $50,000 is in no way the same as someone removing $50,000 from your bank account. It's an opportunity cost.
      - vonmoltke 13y ago
        "[I]n no way the same"? Either one reduces my profit for the year by $50,000. One comes out of revenue, the other comes out of cash on hand (or increases debt, as the case may be). Yes, there are trade-offs and differing side effects from the situations, but they are similar in their effect on the bottom line. Also, losing $50,000 in business because of a supplier or subcontractor failure is not an opportunity cost.
    - count 13y ago
      Then engineer your cloud provided architecture to be resilient, in the same manner you do so with hardware. At least you get $500 - with an onsite, self-owned infrastructure outage, you lose that $50k...and get nothing but pain and direct blame!

bijbij 13y ago

It is the most ridiculous article I have ever read because it doesn't consider the cost of maintaining and support.

oijaf888 13y ago
Who maintains your AWS instances? You still need someone to create AMIs, script updates, destroy stuck machines, etc. The physical cost of maintenance is pretty minimal unless you have a massive deployment or you have really poor hardware. Especially since if you have a few racks at any decent datacenter they will provide basic remote hands support to do things like replace failed drives.
malij 13y ago
I agree with you. Sometimes hiring a person for maintaining is more expensive and sometimes is cheaper. It depends on the scale of product.
- bijbij 13y ago
  It is not just about hiring people there are too many parameters like providing backups and infrastrcture and so many on
  - vonmoltke 13y ago
    And how many of those are significantly different between the two options? Either way, you still need one or more sysadmins, you still need a backup setup. Sure, there are extra maintenance costs associated with owning the hardware, but what portion of maintaining a server infrastructure is tied up specifically in that, and how does it scale relative to the size of the cluster?
    - nasalgoat 13y ago
      In my experience of managing a team of 10+ admins, less than 5% of their time was spent dealing with physical hardware and that includes installation and repair. Today's equipment is very reliable.

jrs235 13y ago

Long term yes, it's cheaper to own than rent/lease. Renting/leasing is often more cash flow friendly in the short/near term (due to not needing large sums of initial investment and [in the U.S.] tax implications of OpEx vs CapEx expenditures) If you're trying to preserve capital in a start-up situation renting/leasing is the way to go until you know what resources you actually need.

noodle 13y ago
It's also risk mitigation. You can spin those AWS instances up and down smoothly depending on your needs. You can't get rid of a 1+ year lease agreement, or something that you purchased. Nor is it a good idea to buy/lease more quickly without really thinking about the long-term financials.
- toomuchtodo 13y ago
  YES. Once the business fundamentals (profitability/cost savings), load profile, and your team's skills can support physical infrastructure, it makes sense to do so. Until then, virtualize!
- nasalgoat 13y ago
  Unless you're running spot instances, that logic doesn't work.
  - noodle 13y ago
    Could you elaborate on this?
    - nasalgoat 13y ago
      Reserved instances are paid for a full year.
      - noodle 13y ago
        1) There's a difference between on-demand and spot instances. 2) Well... yes. My entire premise is based upon not making any long-term leases/purchases, as I stated. Hence, if you bought a 1 year reserved instance, you're doing long-term leasing, and therefore your situation doesn't fall into what I was discussing. So, I'm not sure what your point is.

bfell 13y ago

I think this article does an OK job of outlining parts of the decision tree for cloud vs. self-hosted (while ignoring other options like traditional hosting providers). The other things to consider are staffing and materials costs if maintaining servers in house, DR/business continuity, time value of money depending on how the servers are financed, replacement of aging hardware and operating environments, and differences of how the infrastructure would be built (clustered, load balanced, geographic load balanced, etc.). The reality is cloud providers provide a lot of building blocks for you to use to design infrastructure in a more robust manner but that doesn't mean that other options should be ignored - it’s another decision that depends on the factors laid out in the article and a lot of others that are specific to each organization.

api 13y ago

You also have to take time into account. Self-hosting is going to take a bit more time to coordinate, administrate, and possibly even fiddle with hardware. I'd also like to see a comparison with other cloud providers, since Amazon is rather expensive.

bhaisaab 13y ago

While it may depend on a company's requirements; speaking for the startup I work for -- we use bare-metal servers that give us more bang for the buck and they are cheaper than aws and cloud solutions in general that we've compared (note: we were on Linode in the beginning but are now on SoftLayer)

Spooky23 13y ago

What's the cost of staff who speak AWS lingo and know how to engineer solutions vs. traditional server environments? In our work with private cloud, traditional enterprise data center folks don't seem to grok cloud.

electrograv 13y ago

Another case where self hosting can be much less expensive (by orders of magnitude, in fact) than cloud providers is compute-bottlenecked tasks, e.g. machine learning experiments with huge training sets. A single self-hosted compute server that costs ~$20/month in electricity to run 24/7 would cost over $1500/month from AWS.

svmegatron 13y ago
OTOH, you may have to buy the self-hosted server, which could sway the cost calculation back in favor of cloud hosting.
Xylakant 13y ago
This may be swayed by the fact that you might have a task that can be run in parallel on multiple machines and then finish in an hour, so that you can then move on. Buying or renting enough capacity and then leaving idle for the remaining time is not an option, but with AWS you can easily spin up 100 instances for an hour and do the computational worth for 4 days of a single machine, then shut them down at no extra cost.
- vonmoltke 13y ago
  That is the use case that AWS is best for. That is not the use case covered in the article, though. The use case being discussed is that for a cluster of always-on machines with a fairly consistent load. If you have a minimum baseline load on your servers, fulfilling that from AWS, or Azure, or similar services doesn't make financial sense. Colocated (if you don't mind dealing with the hardware) or leased (if you do mind) servers for your baseline load combined with cloud machines for load spikes makes the most sense.
kayoone 13y ago
I am totally not convinced by AWS, but to be taken seriously you will have to factor in the initial price of that machine if you make a comparison like that.

mpchlets 13y ago

It seems to me that this post is missing the advantages of Cloud Computing (AWS) and the Cloud Ecosystem. The Cloud is not less expensive than physical servers - it is different and a different beast. You have flexibility and a different toolset, as well the ability to start a new server without procurement. As well, it completely disregards some of the advantages of physical servers, including in-box IO (disk) needs. Clouds have not been good in the past for high-IO apps. As well, you get more control at the expense of flexibility. Overall - the determination of Cloud vs Physical should not be based solely on Price but needs and overall Ecosystem that you want to participate in. Not to mention, as an independent consultant and developer, the ability to spin up a new server to play with any time is invaluable.

jmngomes 13y ago

I don't think "bang for the buck" comparisons are the main issue here. The main advantage of going for AWS (especially) or other cloud provider is flexibility: you shrink and grow your server farms whenever you need to, with little setup/maintenance costs. So, cost savings come, mainly, from not paying for idle/underused hardware. At scale, these can make it cheaper to go cloud rather than self-hosted.

kayoone 13y ago
Sounds nice in theory, but how often do you actually need to do that? More often than not, you are still overpaying on AWS vs a simple leased server. Look at what you get for a mere 50 bucks/month http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex40 http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex40 Add 10 to that and you have dual SSDs, no long term contracts and provisioning of new machines within the same day, mostly <2 hours.
- jmngomes 13y ago
  > "More often than not, you are still overpaying on AWS vs a simple leased server" Sorry, didn't explain myself properly: that's exactly my point. Unless you have enough scale to enjoy the benefits of on-demand shrink/grow, you're better off with offers like the one you posted or even other cloud providers like DO. A good thing about AWS is that it ended up forcing down prices for leased servers.

utopkara 13y ago

There is something wrong about the "Total Costs for Different Data Transit Cost Assumptions". The hybrid cost should not be less than its parts, it could follow the lowest cost line at best.

sehugg 13y ago

I don't see any mention of storage costs in the article. If you're using S3, it's really hard to wean off of it, and using it externally doesn't usually make economic sense because you're paying twice for bandwidth. And if you go to a S3-compatiable service, you miss out on Amazon's cost-saving features like Glacier, lifecycle management etc. Amazon's storage pricing is already pretty competitive: http://www.twinstrata.com/cloud-storage-pricing/ http://www.twinstrata.com/cloud-storage-pricing/

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

pm90 13y ago

Google started with used computers crammed into a Stanford dorm room. Just sayin'...

kayoone 13y ago

At my last startup we were running everything off of AWS but i would not do it again except for some short running toy projects. We ended up paying a few hundred $ per month for a web and db server that were just barely usable in terms of speed. Compare that to a box i can get for EUR 50 over at Hetzner that alone is multiple times faster than the 2 small AWS vms . Need another one ? Will be provisioned in about an hour...don't need an instance anymore ? Cancel it by the end of the month, no long term contracts. Yes there is a one-time fee for setting up a new box, but thats about it. And you don't believe how far you can get with a proper beefy 2, maybe 3 machine setup..For EUR 150 you get power equivalent to spending >1000 on AWS easily. Today AWS to me only makes sense for short term computing projects or something very time limited (eg <4weeks) or if money simply doesn't matter. Everything else is just marketing bla, i still need todo the same setup work on AWS.