[Lucasoato]

Hetzner is definitely an interesting option. I’m a bit scared of managing the services on my own (like Postgres, Site2Site VPN, …) but the price difference makes it so appealing. From our financial models, Hetzner can win over AWS when you spend over 10~15K per month on infrastructure and you’re hiring really well. It’s still a risk, but a risk that definitely can be worthy.

[mrweasel]

> I’m a bit scared of managing the services on my own

I see it from the other direction, when if something fails, I have complete access to everything, meaning that I have a chance of fixing it. That's down to hardware even. Things get abstracted away, hidden behind APIs and data lives beyond my reach, when I run stuff in the cloud.

Security and regular mistakes are much the same in the cloud, but I then have to layer whatever complications the cloud provide comes with on top. If cost has to be much much lower if I'm going to trust a cloud provider over running something in my own data center.

[iso1631]

Do you want the power to fix or do you want the paper to wave so you aren't held accountable.

The main benefit of outsourcing to aws etc is that the CEO isn't yelling at you when it breaks, because their golf buddies are in the same situation.

[adamcharnock]

You sum it up very neatly. We've heard this from quite a few companies, and that's kind of why we started our ours.

We figured, "Okay, if we can do this well, reliably, and de-risk it; then we can offer that as a service and just split the difference on the cost savings"

(plus we include engineering time proportional to cluster size, and also do the migration on our own dime as part of the de-risking)

[wulfstan]

I've just shifted my SWE infrastructure from AWS to Hetzner (literally in the last month). My current analysis looks like it will be about 15-20% of the cost - £240 vs 40-50 euros.

Expect a significant exit expense, though, especially if you are shifting large volumes of S3 data. That's been our biggest expense. I've moved this to Wasabi at about 8 euros a month (vs about $70-80 a month on S3), but I've paid transit fees of about $180 - and it was more expensive because I used DataSync.

Retrospectively, I should have just DIYed the transfer, but maybe others can benefit from my error...

[adamcharnock]

FYI, AWS offers free Egress when leaving them (because they were forced to be EU regulation, but they chose to offer it globally):

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/free-data-transfer-out-to-i...

But. Don't leave it until the last minute to talk to them about this. They don't make it easy, and require some warning (think months, IIRC)

[iso1631]

> I’m a bit scared of managing the services on my own (like Postgres, Site2Site VPN, …)

Out of interest, how old are you? This was quite normal expectation of a technical department even 15 years ago.

[christophilus]

I’m curious to know the answer, too. I used to deploy my software on-prem back in the day, and that always included an installation of Microsoft SQL Server. So, all of my clients had at least one database server they had to keep operational. Most of those clients didn’t have an IT staff at all, so if something went wrong (which was exceedingly rare), they’d call me and I’d walk them through diagnosing and fixing things, or I’d Remote Desktop into the server if their firewalls permitted and fix it myself. Backups were automated and would produce an alert if they failed to verify.

It’s not rocket science, especially when you’re talking about small amounts of data (small credit union systems in my example).

[infecto]

No it was not. 15 years ago Heroku was the rage. Even the places that had bare metal usually had someone running something similar to devops and at least core infrar was not being touched. I am sure places existed but 15 years while far away was already pretty far along from what you describe. At least in SV.

[Lucasoato]

Ahah I'm 31, but deciding if it makes sense to manage your own db doesn't depend on the age of the CTO.

See, turning up a VM, installing and running Postgres is easy.

The hard part is keeping it updated, keeping the OS updated, automate backups, deploying replicas, encrypting the volumes and the backups, demonstrating to a third party auditor all of the above... and mind that there might be many other things I honestly ignore!

I'm not saying I won't go that path, it might be a good idea after a certain scale, but in the first and second year of a startup your mind should 100% be on "How can I make my customer happy" rather than "We failed again the audit, we won't have the SOC 2 Type I certification in time to sign that new customer".

If deciding between Hetzner and AWS was so easy, one of them might not be pricing its services correctly.

[baby]

I’m wondering if it makes sense to distribute your architecture so that workers who do most of the heavy lifting are in hetzner, while the other stuff is in costly AWS. On the other hand this means you don’t have easy access to S3, etc.

[rockwotj]

networking costs are so high in AWS I doubt this makes sense

[objektif]

No amount of money will make me maintain my own dbs. We tried it at first and it was a nightmare.

[g8oz]

It's worth becoming good at.

[dev_l1x_be]

Or CDN, queues, log service, observability, distributed storage. I am not even sure what the people in the on-prem vs cloud argument think. If you need a highly specialised infra with one or two core services and a lower tier network is ok then on-prem is ok. Otherwise if is a never ending quest to re-discover the millions of engineering hours went into building something like AWS.