As 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.
Herzner storage is a drop in replacement for S3. Even though there are some minor differences, it's not like the difference between a managed NAT and a router.
There's a distinction between just saying it's more expensive and saying it's slower at the same price. Compared to well spec'ed and administered dedicated servers, it's basically impossible to get the same performance from AWS (or other cloud services) at any price. Yes, there are advantages, scaling being the greatest one. But you won't get the same raw speed you can achieve with fast storage and processing in a single machine (or a tight network) through cloud services—probably at all, but certainly not for anywhere near the same price.
And if you are willing to pay, you can significantly over-provision dedicated servers, solving much of the scaling problem as well.
I'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.
What 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?
At this point managing AWS, Azure or other cloud providers is as complicated or more complicated than managing your own but at an enormous cost multiplier and if you have steady traffic workloads I'm not sure it makes sense for most companies other than burning money. You still need to pay a sysadmin to manage the cloud and the complexity of the ecosystem is pretty brutal. Combine that with random changes in shit that causes problems like when we got locked out of our Azure account because they changed how part of their roles system works. I've also seen people not understanding the complexity of permissions etc and giving way to much access to people who should not have access.
When I was learning cloud computing I ran an ASP.Net forum software on Azure Cloud Service with Azure SQL backend. It cost me ~110 USD per month and was a total dog - slow as hell intermittently.
Moved it to AWS on a small instance running Server 2012 / IIS / SqlExpress and it ran like a champ for 10 USD a month. Did that for years. Only main thing I had to do was install Fail2Ban, because being on cloud IP space seemed to invite more attackers.
10 dollars a month is probably less than I paid in electricity to run my home server.
A better presentation would be to have someone make the best performance/price on AWS EC2, then someone else make the best performance/price on Hetzner and compare.
I myself used EC2 instances with locally attached NVMe drives with (mdadm) RAID-0 on BTRFS that was quite fast. It was for a CI/CD pipeline so only the config and the most recent build data needed to be kept. Either BTRFS or the CI/CD database (PostgreSQL I think) would eventually get corrupted and I'd run a rebuild script a few times a year.
i made a similar comment on the video a week ago. It is an AWFUL analysis, in almost every way. Which is shocking, because its so easy to show that AWS is overpriced and underpowered.
I'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.
This 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
I've been trying to start a very similar thing around here (Spain) at first specializing a bit on backups and storage, still working very small as an independent contractor while I keep my daily job (at least for now, I'm testing the waters...).
I don't really totally miss the days where I had to configure multipath storage with barely documented systems ("No, we don't support Suse, Debian, whatever...", "No, you don't pay for the highest support level, you can't access the knowledge base..."), or integrate disparate systems that theoretically were using an open standard but was botched and modified by every vendor (For example DICOM. Nowadays the situation is way better.) or other nightmare situations. Although I miss accessing the lower layers.
But I've been working for years with my employers and clients cloud providers, and I've seen how the bills climb through the roof, and how easy is to make a million-dollar mistake, how difficult (and expensive) is to leave in some cases, and how the money and power is concentrated in a handful of companies, and I've decided that I should work on that situation. Although probably I'll earn less money, as the 'external contractor' situation is not that good in Spain as in some other countries, unless you're very specialized.
But thankfully, the situation is in some cases better than in the 00s: documentation is easier to get, hardware is cheaper to come by and experiment or even use it for business, WAN connections are way cheaper...
Just 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.
Sure, 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)
Although 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.
Didn'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.
I 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.
More often than not, I’d rather avoid the self-focused staff who rarely give it to you with hygiene in mind and at this time of the year in the northern hemisphere are likely to be sick, the mediocre coffee (price surge in coffee beans), and the dirty tables at a café, and the uncomfortable seating. And it’s rather 5€ for the croissant alone, in many places these days. Lidl’s croissants aren’t very good but they’re only marginally less good than what you can hope for at a café. McDonald’s croissants in Italy are quite ok by the way.
Exactly. AWS has its own quirks and frustrations, sure but at the end of the day, I’m not using AWS just for raw compute. I’m paying for the entire ecosystem around it: security and access management, S3, Lambda, networking, monitoring, reliability guarantees, and a hundred little things that quietly keep the lights on.
People can have different opinions on this, of course, but personally, if I have a choice, I'd rather not be juggling both product development and the infrastructure headaches that come with running everything myself. That trade-off isn’t worth it for me.
When 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.
IIRC, 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.
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.
I’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.
This 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.
> 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".
I 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
Why 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.
Pricing 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.
You 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.
compare 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.
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.
> 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.
danpalmer|3 months ago
Managed NAT gateways are also 10000x more expensive than my router.
This is a boring argument that has been done to death.
oersted|3 months ago
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.
BenGosub|3 months ago
tempestn|3 months ago
And if you are willing to pay, you can significantly over-provision dedicated servers, solving much of the scaling problem as well.
kachapopopow|3 months ago
dainiusse|3 months ago
paranoidrobot|3 months ago
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|3 months ago
Shared instances is something even European "cloud" providers can do so why is EC2 so much more expensive and slower?
christkv|3 months ago
benterix|3 months ago
RajT88|3 months ago
Moved it to AWS on a small instance running Server 2012 / IIS / SqlExpress and it ran like a champ for 10 USD a month. Did that for years. Only main thing I had to do was install Fail2Ban, because being on cloud IP space seemed to invite more attackers.
10 dollars a month is probably less than I paid in electricity to run my home server.
spiderfarmer|3 months ago
karmakaze|3 months ago
I myself used EC2 instances with locally attached NVMe drives with (mdadm) RAID-0 on BTRFS that was quite fast. It was for a CI/CD pipeline so only the config and the most recent build data needed to be kept. Either BTRFS or the CI/CD database (PostgreSQL I think) would eventually get corrupted and I'd run a rebuild script a few times a year.
nchmy|3 months ago
otabdeveloper4|3 months ago
Ooof. Not a good look.
woolion|3 months ago
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.
adamcharnock|3 months ago
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
tecleandor|3 months ago
I don't really totally miss the days where I had to configure multipath storage with barely documented systems ("No, we don't support Suse, Debian, whatever...", "No, you don't pay for the highest support level, you can't access the knowledge base..."), or integrate disparate systems that theoretically were using an open standard but was botched and modified by every vendor (For example DICOM. Nowadays the situation is way better.) or other nightmare situations. Although I miss accessing the lower layers.
But I've been working for years with my employers and clients cloud providers, and I've seen how the bills climb through the roof, and how easy is to make a million-dollar mistake, how difficult (and expensive) is to leave in some cases, and how the money and power is concentrated in a handful of companies, and I've decided that I should work on that situation. Although probably I'll earn less money, as the 'external contractor' situation is not that good in Spain as in some other countries, unless you're very specialized.
But thankfully, the situation is in some cases better than in the 00s: documentation is easier to get, hardware is cheaper to come by and experiment or even use it for business, WAN connections are way cheaper...
h_ko|3 months ago
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.
ozgrakkurt|3 months ago
ody4242|3 months ago
enronmusk|3 months ago
I believe their bare metal servers should have even better price/perf ratio, but I don't have data to back that up.
spwa4|3 months ago
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|3 months ago
jwr|3 months ago
flibble|3 months ago
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.
baxtr|3 months ago
I also like the "why does a bottle of water cost $5 after security at airports" example.
You have no choice. You’re locked in and can’t get out.
Maybe that’s the better analogy?
whstl|3 months ago
AWS is just an extremely expensive Lidl.
EDIT: autocorrect typo, coffee to café
4ndrewl|3 months ago
jmaker|3 months ago
boxed|3 months ago
stacktrace|3 months ago
People can have different opinions on this, of course, but personally, if I have a choice, I'd rather not be juggling both product development and the infrastructure headaches that come with running everything myself. That trade-off isn’t worth it for me.
Meekro|3 months ago
"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.
mrtksn|3 months ago
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.
willtemperley|3 months ago
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.
unknown|3 months ago
[deleted]
jmaker|3 months ago
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.
jonathanstrange|3 months ago
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|3 months ago
That's nothing compared to an average AWS bill.
whstl|3 months ago
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".
perrohunter|3 months ago
3ds|3 months ago
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|3 months ago
There have also been a couple of thread in text based form about the same topic. Some like text, some like video.
bast0000|3 months ago
mgaunard|3 months ago
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|3 months ago
unknown|3 months ago
[deleted]
ojr|3 months ago
jdjsjhsgsgh|3 months ago
jdjsjhsgsgh|3 months ago
hhh|3 months ago
dev_l1x_be|3 months ago
typpilol|3 months ago
The entire point of AWS is so you don't have to get a dedicated server.
It's infra as a service.
hshdhdhj4444|3 months ago
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.
littlestymaar|3 months ago
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|3 months ago