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Every time I see a comment like this, I get the feeling that the poster doesn't understand how "the cloud" works. Everybody knows that renting a dedicated serv

Every time I see a comment like this, I get the feeling that the poster doesn't understand how "the cloud" works. Everybody knows that renting a dedicated server (or purchasing your own servers) is generally a more cost effective approach. Cloud computing is used to accomplish different goals when used appropriately. Sure you could install MySQL on a box at Hetzner, but what happens when it goes down? Do you feel like maintaining the box for security and updates? What about log rotation? What if you need to migrate to a different geographical region, or need to increase capacity? Smaller sites might be okay with managing those on their own, but as you grow, being able to offload that work to Amazon (who tend to know what they are doing more than the average joe) is a benefit when you have other business-logic issues to deal with. So yes, naively getting a box at Hetzner or any other dedicated provider would be less of an upfront monetary cost, but in the long run, the advantages aren't as clear cut.

waps 11y ago
Really ? And what if Amazon loses data ? [1] But all data saved to S3 was safe, right ? No. [2] The key to decent safety is to 1) have an online backup at a different provider you can switch to quickly 2) have regular offline backups 3) actually reinstall from those offline backups on a regular basis Amazon falls flat on it's face with (1). If you use Amazon's tools you cannot have that, period. I would argue that securing against amazon financial failure is one of the important objectives of (2), so you cannot use glacier for that. This means that using just amazon (or even having your primary and online backup on amazon) is a bad idea. Given that you can't really use those amazon products anyway, you may as well save the money and go for hetzner and ovh or something like that. Famous customers like Netflix moved away from Amazon lock in [3] and for anything that you want to last, you should too. We all know that most people's backup strategy tends to be "X" will never fail. X in the worst case is their hard drive. For larger businesses X usually is something like EMC, and we've all seen it fail (usually, to be fair, not EMC's fault). You are replacing X with "Amazon" and that's it. [1] http://www.businessinsider.com.au/amazon-lost-data-2011-4 http://www.businessinsider.com.au/amazon-lost-data-2011-4 [2] http://www.quora.com/Has-Amazon-S3-ever-lost-data-permanently http://www.quora.com/Has-Amazon-S3-ever-lost-data-permanentl... [3] http://venturebeat.com/2014/06/19/adrian-cockcroft-public-cloud/ http://venturebeat.com/2014/06/19/adrian-cockcroft-public-cl...

waps 11y ago

Really ? And what if Amazon loses data ? [1] But all data saved to S3 was safe, right ? No. [2] The key to decent safety is to 1) have an online backup at a different provider you can switch to quickly 2) have regular offline backups 3) actually reinstall from those offline backups on a regular basis Amazon falls flat on it's face with (1). If you use Amazon's tools you cannot have that, period. I would argue that securing against amazon financial failure is one of the important objectives of (2), so you cannot use glacier for that. This means that using just amazon (or even having your primary and online backup on amazon) is a bad idea. Given that you can't really use those amazon products anyway, you may as well save the money and go for hetzner and ovh or something like that. Famous customers like Netflix moved away from Amazon lock in [3] and for anything that you want to last, you should too. We all know that most people's backup strategy tends to be "X" will never fail. X in the worst case is their hard drive. For larger businesses X usually is something like EMC, and we've all seen it fail (usually, to be fair, not EMC's fault). You are replacing X with "Amazon" and that's it. [1] http://www.businessinsider.com.au/amazon-lost-data-2011-4 http://www.businessinsider.com.au/amazon-lost-data-2011-4 [2] http://www.quora.com/Has-Amazon-S3-ever-lost-data-permanently http://www.quora.com/Has-Amazon-S3-ever-lost-data-permanentl... [3] http://venturebeat.com/2014/06/19/adrian-cockcroft-public-cloud/ http://venturebeat.com/2014/06/19/adrian-cockcroft-public-cl...