HN Reader

This is all correct. I've been running my own servers for many years now, keeping things simple and saving a lot of money and time (setting anything up in AWS or Azure is horribly complicated and the UIs are terrible).

One thing to remember is that you do need to treat your servers as "cloud servers" in the sense that you should be able to re-generate your entire setup from your configuration at any time, given a bunch of IPs with freshly-installed base OSs. That means ansible or something similar.

If you insist on using cloud (virtual) servers, do yourself a favor and use DigitalOcean, it is simple and direct and will let you keep your sanity. I use DO as a third-tier disaster recovery scenario, with terraform for bringing up the cluster and the same ansible setup for setting everything up.

I am amused by the section about not making friends saying this :-) — most developer communities tend to develop a herd mentality, where something is either all the rage, or is "dead", and people are afraid to use their brains to experiment and make rational decisions.

Me, I'm rather happy that my competitors fight with AWS/Azure access rights management systems, pay a lot of money for hosting and network bandwith, and then waste time on Kubernetes because it's all the rage. I'll stick to my boring JVM-hosted Clojure monolith, deployed via ansible to a cluster of physical servers and live well off the revenue from my business.

I dislike those black and white takes a lot. It's absolutely true that most startups that just run an EC2 instance will save a lot of cash going to Hetzner, Linode, Digital Ocean or whatever. I do host at Hetzner myself and so do a lot of my clients.

That being said, the cloud does have a lot of advantages:

- You're getting a lot of services readily available. Need offsite backups? A few clicks. Managed database? A few clicks. Multiple AZs? Available in seconds.

- You're not paying up-front costs (vs. investing hundreds of dollars for buying server hardware) and everything is available right now [0]

- Peak-heavy loads can be a lot cheaper. Mostly irrelevant for you average compute load, but things are quite different if you need to train an LLM

- Many services are already certified according to all kinds of standards, which can be very useful depending on your customers

Also, engineering time and time in general can be expensive. If you are a solo entrepreneur or a slow growth company, you have a lot of engineering time for basically free. But in a quick growth or prototyping phase, not to speak of venture funding, things can be quite different. Buying engineering time for >150€/hour can quickly offset a lot of saving [1].

Does this apply to most companies? No. Obviously not. But the cloud is not too expensive - you're paying for stuff you don't need. That's an entirely different kind of error.

[0] Compared to the rack hosting setup described in the post. Hetzner, Linode, etc. do provide multiple AZs with dedicated servers.

[1] Just to be fair, debugging cloud errors can be time consuming, too, and experienced AWS engineers will not be cheaper. But an RDS instance with solid backups-equivalent will usually not amortize quickly, if you need to pay someone to set it up.

I took care of IT for a startup hedge fund once. I was the quant's right-hand man, data engineer, visualization dashboard guy, everything. The quant needed to run a monolithic C++ program daily to chew through stock data and we decided a dual-Xeon server with 512 GB RAM would be great. OVH MG-512, for those curious.

Quant happy, boss happy, all good. Then the boss goes for lunch with someone and comes back slightly disturbed. We were not buzzword compliant. Apparently the other guy made him feel that he was using outdated tech by not being on AWS, using auto-scaling etc;

Here I am, from a background where my first language was 8086 assembly, and compactness was important to me. I remember thinking, "This whole thing could run on a powerful calculator, except for the RAM requirement".

It was a good lesson for me. Most CTOs know this bias and have unnecessarily huge and wasteful budgets but make sure they keep the business heads happy in the comfort that the firm is buzzword compliant. Efficiency and compactness are a marketing liability for IT heads!

I'm fully aware this is pedantic, but you can't save 10x. You can pay 1/10. You can save 90%. Your previous costs could have been 10x your current costs. But 10x is more by definition, not less. You can't save it.

While I love a good cloud bashing, it's really not black and white. If you're really small, it probably doesn't matter much if you're using Hetzner or AWS, but co-location might be a bit to expensive. If you run an absolutely massive company, cloud vs. self-hosted comes down to whether or not you can build tooling as good as AWS, GCP or Azure, with all the billing infrastructure and reporting.

The issues are mostly in the SME segment and where it really depends on what your business is. Do you need completely separate system for each customer? In that case, AWS is going to be easier and probably cheaper. Are you running a constant low 24/7? Then you should consider buying your own servers.

It's really hard to apply a blanket conclusion to all industries, in regards to cloud cost and whether or not it's worth it. My criticism in regards to opting for cloud is that people want all the benefits of the cloud, but not use any of the features, because that would lock them into e.g. AWS. If you're using AWS as a virtual machine platform only, there's always going to be cheaper (and maybe better) options.

The author touches on it briefly, but I'd argue that the cloud is immensely helpful for building (and tearing down) an MVP or proving an early market for a new company using startup credits or free tiers offered by all vendors. Once a business model has been proven, individual components and the underlying infrastructure can be moved out of the cloud as soon as cost becomes a concern.

This means that teams must make an up-front architectural decision to develop apps in a server-agnostic manner, and developers must stay disciplined to keep components portable from day one, but you can get a lot of mileage out of free credits without burning dollars on any infrastructure. The biggest challenge becomes finding the time to perform these migrations among other competing priorities, such as new feature development, especially if you're growing fast.

Our startup is mostly built on Google Cloud, but I don't think our sales rep is very happy with how little we spend or that we're unwilling to "commit" to spending. The ability to move off of the cloud, or even just to another cloud, provides a lot of leverage in the negotiating seat.

Cloud vendors can also lead to an easier risk/SLA conversation for downstream customers. Depending on your business, enterprise users like to see SLAs and data privacy laws respected around the globe, and cloud providers make it easy to say "not my problem" if things are structured correctly.

Its not actually that hard to get your own server racked up in a data centre, I have done it. Since it was only one box that I built and installed at home I just shipped it and they racked it in the shared area and plugged the power and network in and gave me the IP address. It was cheaper than renting from someone like hetzner, was about £15 a month at the time for 1A and 5TB a month of traffic at 1gbps. Also had a one off install fee of £75.

At the time I did this no one had good gaming CPUs in the cloud, they are still a bit rare really especially in VPS offerings and I was hosting a gaming community and server. So I made a pair of machines in a 1U with dual machines in there and had a public and private server with raid 1 drives on both and redundant power. Ran that for a gaming server for many years until it was obsolete. It wasn't difficult and I think the machine was about £1200 in all, which for 2 computers running game servers wasn't too terrible.

I didn't do this because it was necessarily cheaper, I did it because I couldn't find a cloud server to rent with a high clockspeed CPU in it. I tested numerous cloud providers, sent emails asking for specs and after months of chasing it down I didn't feel like I had much choice. Turned out to be quite easy and over the years it saved a fortune.

I'd be more interested to understand (from folk who were there) what the conditions were that made AWS et al such a runaway hit. What did folks gain, and have those conditions meaningfully changed in some way that makes it less of a slam dunk?

My recollection from working at a tech company in the early 2010s is that renting rack space and building servers was expensive and time consuming, estimating what the right hardware configuration would be for your business was tricky, and scaling different services independently was impossible. also having multi regional redundancy was rare (remember when squarespace was manually carrying buckets of petrol for generators up many flights of stairs to keeps servers online post sandy?[1]).

AWS fixed much of that. But maybe things have changed in ways that meaningfully changes the calculus?

[1] https://www.squarespace.com/press-coverage/2012-11-1-after-s...

Basically it boils down to:

Is your time worth more than what the fully managed services on AWS cost? And I mean that quite literally in the sense of your billable hours.

If you like spending time tinkering with manually configuring linux servers, and don't have anything else that generates better value for you to do - by all means go for it.

For small pet projects with no customers, a cheap Hetzner box is probably fine. For serious projects with customers that expect you to be able to get back on your feet quickly when shit hits the fan, or teams of developers that lose hours of productivity when a sandbox environment goes down, maybe not so much.

Is AWS more expensive than the salary of the infra guy you would need to hire to do all this stuff by hand? Probably not.

The first couple of paragraphs of price comparisons are useful. Then there are many paragraphs of sheer waffle. The author doesn't even seem able to define what "the cloud" is:

> The whole debate of “is this still the cloud or not” is nonsense to me. You’re just getting lost in naming conventions. VPS, bare metal, on-prem, colo, who cares what you call it. You need to put your servers somewhere. Sure, have a computer running in your mom’s basement if that makes you feel like you’re exiting the cloud more, I’ll have mine in a datacenter and both will be happy.

"To them, it’s way too convenient to be on AWS: not only it solves their problem, but it’s also a shiny object. It’s technically complex, it makes them look smart in front of other devs, "

why? why be so obnoxious to other people who you claim are being obnoxious to you. no need to read your blog post now/

Cheap shot maybe, but the fact that the page takes 10 seconds to load when it hits the HN front page is a great, inadvertant illustration of why you might want to use the cloud sometimes.

The cloud is a good idea. It becomes a bad idea when it is the only thing you know or, most likely, is the only cloud you know.

How much is your labor worth though? The actual cost of a server is not expensive; the maintenance behind it is. If I have a fleet of 10 EC2 instances, I can keep them patched with Systems Manager without having to build any of that automation myself.

Host is erroring out, so webpage is down, per cloudflare.

I'm quite sympathetic to on-prem but there's a possible argument against.

What I always say when given a false choice: ¿porque no las dos?

vcpu, iops, transfer fees, storage -- they are all resources going into a pool .

If Hetzner is giving you 10TB for $100 , then host your static files/images there and save $800.

Apps are very modular. You have services, asyncs, LBs, static files . Just put the compute where it is most cost effective.

You don't have to close your AWS account to stick it to the man. Like any utility, just move your resources to where they are most affordable.

Help convince me I should be confident taking responsibility for:

* off-site db backups

* a guaranteed db restore process

* auditable access to servers

* log persistence and integrity

* timely security patching

* intrusion detection

so that my employer can save money.

Why it feels like the author is too young and just had breaking discovery that he can have servers without clouds!? Always been a thing, clouds were/are used in areas where it would be better, say some integration with already existing infrastructure, or some quick scaling. Just like everything, there’s always upside and downside, and it’s just about what suits your needs. The author should next try an on-prem approach where he even controls the hardware, even more cheaper but with extra maintenance. For example, I found a used server a while ago (44 Core HP Z840 WorkStation Dual Xeon E5-2699 V4 512GB RAM) for around $1000, that’s a one time pay.

After a few months of experimenting on AWS, I got scared seeing how fast small side projects could turn into expensive monthly bills.

I built my own DIY cloud, a minimal self-hosted setup that lets me deploy apps, databases, and backups on cheap VPS or bare-metal servers. At first I just wanted to save money, but I realized that managing it can easily become a full-time SRE job.

Still, for small, experimental, or hobby projects, this setup works perfectly. It keeps costs predictable and gives full control without needing large-scale infrastructure.

https://diy-cloud.remikeat.com

Would love to hear from others who tried leaving managed clouds behind.

I think the main thing holding people back from leaving the cloud is simple inertia. There was a time when the cloud was obviously the right choice. Static IPv4 addresses were becoming scarce, IPv6 had not been deployed widely enough, and cloud providers made it easy to stand up a server and some storage with high speed links on the cheap. But over time, things have changed. Rate limits, data caps, and egress fees are now normal (and costly). IPv6 is now deployed widely enough that you might be willing to just run an IPv6-only stack, which greatly simplifies running a server on-premise. And of course, we've all seen time and again how providers will carelessly lock out your cloud account for arbitrary reasons with little to no recourse. The time has come to own your infrastructure again. But that won't happen until people realize it's easy to do.

I don't particularly like this article, mostly because he seems to have spent the great majority of it ranting about people on the internet supposedly yelling at him about not being "on the cloud" and semantics about exactly what constitutes "the cloud". I'd be much more interested in reading exactly what he was spending that money on at AWS and how he moved it all onto one or a few bare-metal boxes.

I don't think AWS is particularly expensive at all. In fact, it's rather cheap at quite a few things if you know what you're doing and use the right services. I've got all my server backups going to S3, for which I pay a whopping penny a month. I also host a handful of Docker images on ECR for 7 cents a month - way cheaper than any other private hosting service I know of.

Now RDS, and the equivalent at every other hosting provider I know of, gets quite pricey indeed. IMO, you shouldn't bother unless you have pretty serious needs for reliability and speed. Apt install your DB server of choice on bare metal goes quite far. Or possibly pull a container of it into whatever you're using to manage containers.

As a note hetzner has a lot of auction servers and I believe they lack the setup fee

There are many scenarios in which cloud providers (especially AWS) make sense.

Ideally, your company has technical experts who can do quite a lot of things non-cloud, so you can make informed decisions about near-term costs, complexity, vendor lock-in, execution speed, etc.

I'm especially a fan of cloud providers for early startups, which tend to be high on velocity, and low on workers. And the free credits programs often solve the early problem of being low on dollars.

The idea that it's cheaper not to use AWS is clear.

I was hoping to see more about porting AWS proprietary features into generic servers.

A big part of the problem isn't just monthly rent, it's vendor lock-in. When your whole system is implemented using AWS specific features, you're not going to run anywhere else.

AWS, and any other third party vendor, can and does obsolete features. Then you're having to port your system just to keep it running on the third party service.

Once you're implemented in a generic server, in a VPS, or your mom's basement, you're free to move to any other hosting provider, data center, whatever.

The loss of understanding that 3rd party dependencies are not good for your company or project, seems a bigger loss to the technical community than FTP hacking...

Jeez, this was a painful read. I actually stopped after a few paragraphs and asked AI to make it more technically focused and remove the ranting so I could stomach it.

Strawman arguments, ad hominem attacks and Spongebob mocking memes, and the casual venturing into conspiracy theories and malicious intentions...

> Why do all these people care if I save more money or not? ... If they’re wrong, and if I and more people like me manage to convince enough people that they’re wrong, they may be out of a job soon.

I have a feeling AWS is doing fine without him. Cloud is one of the fastest growing areas in tech because their product solves a need for certain people. There is no larger conspiracy to keep cloud in business by silencing dissent on Twitter.

> You will hear a bunch of crap from people that have literally never tried the alternative. People with no real hands-on experience managing servers for their own projects for any sustained period of time.

This is more of a rant than a thoughtful technical article. I don't know what I was expecting, because I clicked on the title knowing it was clickbait, so shame on me, I guess...

Is this what I'm missing by not having Twitter?

I think a lot of teams using cloud are using SaaS rather than IaaS. They want a redis and a postgres and a S3 and a ... You can set all that up on a server, but it's not very fun if you've never done it before.

A 2024 International LT Series semi-truck costs $130,000. That's very expensive compared to a $30,000 Ford Maverick.

Both of these trucks can technically be used to pick up groceries and commute. But, uh, if you bought the semi-truck to get groceries and commute? Nobody scammed you; you bought the wrong truck. You don't have to buy the biggest, most expensive truck to do small jobs. But also, just because there's a cheaper truck available, doesn't mean the semi-truck is overpriced or a scam. The semi is more expensive for a reason.

I wonder about people who write articles like these. I imagine at one point he believed he had to use the cloud, so he started using it without understanding what he was doing. As a result, he was charged a ton of money. He then found out there were cheaper, simpler ways to do what he wanted. And so, feeling hurt, embarrassed, and deceived, he writes this long screed, accusing people of scamming him - I mean scamming you - because you (not him!) could not possibly need to use the cloud, even though you (not him!) assumed you had to use the cloud.

Yes, dude. The cloud is expensive. Sorry you found out the hard way. And for what it's worth, you don't need a datacenter either; stick a 1U in your closet and call it a day.

If all you need is compute, than yeah, self hosting is easy. Otherwise, do you think just about every company under the sun is a sucker for being on the cloud? If it was so easy, companies would be either be constantly dropping prices to compete with all the self hosters, or new companies to fill in the price gaps.

I worked for a small, local insurance company 10+ years ago that was not interested in the cloud in any way, shape, or form. They had their servers in two locations—the basement of our office building, and an offsite location ~300 miles away. They were professional server rooms, complete with proper cooling, backup power, and the like.

At first I remember thinking they were behind the times, but now I'm certain they've avoided wasting a fortune on the cloud.

Jumping away from the article slightly, where would you go if you needed a ton of vanilla disk space, the ability to do compute near to that disk, and for it to be accessible with a reasonable pipe to the public internet?

As far as I can tell, you'd almost have to do something with a colo if you didn't want to pay 10x or more for the storage. Are there other options?

I never understood the appeal of AWS like cloud for non corporate. Sure, when you run a BigCo, you have all the money and people to throw at big cloud providers, obtaining pointless certificates, and configuring obscure IAM roles.

But why small businesses like them, I can’t I understand. I host all my stuff on Hetzner. It’s easy, it’s affordable and I “move fast”. I don’t need certificates to be able to manage the servers, and there is tone of information available online. But maybe it’s because I’m old, and I used to ssh to a Linux machine, git pull the latest version, and call in a “deploy”. But modern developed seems to be afraid of raw machines.

The only thing I miss is a good transactional email provider with PAYG pricing, and EU data residency.

For me, it is a lot simpler to host at Linode (or simpler) than figure out the AWS/GCP crazy complex IAM stuff.

However, there are cases where being able to spin down the server, and not pay for downtime is useful - like 36-core Yocto build machines.

I recently had the same realization and moved all my functions to a simple stand-alone server. Besides the normal AWS costs, what scares me most about AWS is the possibility that someone could try to DOS me, leaving me with a huge AWS bill, because there is no real way to limit AWS spending.

The main reason why I keep coming back to cloud providers is databases. I don't feel comfortable setting up a high-availability db setup, and I don't want the responsibility of managing backups. But if you go to, say, Hetzner, you won't be able to use a cloud database in the same network.

Its true that aws is very expensive for a lot of use cases, as long as you only count the cost of the servers.

However, in most (every?) large organisations, buying a server and putting it in a DC, and looking after it, is hugely time-consuming, lengthy and expensive.

You need to get quotes, approvals, purchase, rack, commission, maintain etc etc. It is usually close to 1 year to get a server.

In some companies, even getting a virtual server takes almost as long!

With AWS, once an account and service is approved, boom, you are done.

Even if you don't end up switching, the lesson from this person's experience and the comments here on HN is: Stop being afraid.

People make all sorts of excuses: it's not secure, it's not reliable, it doesn't scale. These are primarily people who have never touched a server. If they had, they would know actual tradeoffs instead of excuses. So go and touch a server and learn how it works.

What if the data center that has your dedicated server burns down? You need to prepare to that buy renting another server at a different data center and synching them. Not a big problem, but needs to be mentioned

In principle, you don't even need a "server", ie purpose-built hardware like what he's showing. An old laptop will be fine for many projects, although I'd be interested if someone can help put a perspective on how to decide whether your specific project/load will be too much for your specific hardware. My bigger concern with 'true' self-hosting would be how to get a good/reliable enough internet connection.

Just a bit of nitpicking. I am AWS certified, I still tell people not to do cloud. I even recommended as much to my current employer, laid out the costs for their architecture project doing on-prem, colo, and cloud (with multiple different cloud vendors), and they still chose AWS. At this point, the choice of cloud is nearly religious (in my observation).

I have some projects with a fairly steady load that I'm currently running on a VPS on Digital Ocean. I have some non-critical ones that I'd be interested in moving to "bare metal" for learning purposes, but having a hard time figuring out what the transition from VPS to dedicated server would look like.

Anybody have any guides or guidance on making the migration? I feel comfortable managing the VPS, but not sure what else I'd need to take on by moving to a dedicated server. I imagine hardware monitoring would be one, but what else?

As with everything, the real answer as to whether or not the cloud is cheaper is "it depends". These simplistic one-sided tirades (intentionally?) leave out a lot of detail, use simple rage-bait titles, and are generally not very thoughtful or coherent.

With the use of chat bots and agents, managing these on prem should be easier than ever right?

The article featured The Server Store. It’s a north Texas company local to where I live. I have purchased all my personal computers from there for about the past decade.

Webserver is down

I’m fundamentally confused. A server in a datacenter is still the cloud. Taking something off the cloud means you have hardware somewhere that you physically manage and pay the power bill.

This is simply collapsing the built for scale tools into a cacophony of open source tools.

You didn’t need it to begin with, you just didn’t know any better.

This exactly what was happening with me and I recently started a project called Postbase to setup my own cloud infrastructure. There is so much free OSS software out there which is 100x better than what Google, Amazon and other offer. github.com/umrashrf/postbase (this is in alpha and work in progress).

yes but most of dude's websites are not loading and some are even without SSL in 2025.. https://imgur.com/a/irWADuq

Love a nice 'single box project'.

But as soon as you start dealing with data sovereignty for your SaaS app, and need co-lo's in multiple geographies, each with their own contract/billing cycles, HA and backup, the global reach and consistency of the cloud providers starts seeming quite compelling again.

You won't believe it, but I can host 100 websites for a maximum of $100 per year.

It may seem strange to you, but PHP servers work very well.

I think it's worth a try.

Having my own server in a datacenter would be cool, buy it's hard to imagine having side projects that I'm willingly spending $1400 US/month on AWS for. Right now I'm still using the free tier on most platforms, plus a $14/month database on digital ocean that I'm not even using

> Most people complaining about what I did happen to have “devops”, “cloud engineer”, “serverless guy”, “AWS certified”, or something similar in their bio.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

― Upton Sinclair

Sorry but my $3 AWS instance is still cheaper than all of those options.

If you need a lot of, well, anything, be it compute, memory, storage, bandwidth etc., of course cloud stuff is going to be more expensive... but if you don't need that, then IMO $3/mo on-demand pricing really can't be beat when I don't have to maintain any equipment myself. Oracle also offers perpetually free VM instances if you don't mind the glow.

a simple valid point wrapped in an enormous amount of garbage arguments from both sides. watching idiots argue is exhausting

The article is hugged to death. Maybe it wasn't hosted in the cloud?

It's an informative post but I really dislike the language and style that are becoming common in this kind of posts, e.g.:

> Look, first of all, you’re as unique as the other 1000 peanut gallery enjoyers that have made the same astute observation before you. Congratulations. But you’re absolutely missing the point.

It seems like a common thread for de-clouders is they run RoR.

Idiotic piece - the purpose of 'the cloud' is to scale large demand applications. Rental hardware can't really do that.

Local first! Someone else said, "You don't actually need any of those things until you no longer have a "project", but a business which will allow you to pay for the things you require." -- Similar response I have for clients and engineers when they waste time/energy/money on "scale" when we are building a prototype... "scale is a luxury that comes with revenue."

Im sure some of you may quip back, "it takes money to make money". No shit. Just dont get high on your own supply... Be smart, be scrappy, slow down.

How do you even get a static IP these days?

Great write-up :) I find hosting VPS on DigitialOcean/Hetzner to be the best middle-ground: you save a lot, but it still convenient; you just SSH into the thing, no need to think about physical cables, cooling, electricity and all the being physical baggage

Fittingly, his website was hugged to death

"I FINALLY got everything off the cloud"

...

...

"P.S. follow me on Twitter"

So uh, not everything

We've moved to Hetzner several years ago, and the savings will ensure we'll likely never consider the Cloud again (Exception is Cloudflare Workers, which is well done with generous quotas). Although it would be way easier to move now since automation, deployment, backup and retention scripts are much faster to write now with AI.

BTW in-case you've missed it [1] Anthropic is offering $250 free credits till Nov 18 for their new Claude Code on the Web [2] for Clause Pro/Max users.

[1] https://x.com/adocomplete/status/1985766988724244839

[2] https://claude.ai/code

Engineering is all tradeoffs.

For this guy who spent thousands per month on AWS, using AWS makes no sense.

For a guy like me whose AWS bill was 38 cents last month, AWS makes a lot of sense. Currently I have a small KaiOS app with about 1000 unique visitors per month hosted on AWS. I used to self-host on an old laptop, but it costs less money to host on AWS (1 kwh cost me 19.89 cents and my laptop uses about 4.5kwh per month). Not to mention the convenience of not having to restart my server for software updates, or update my own certs every 3 months, or fuddling with nginx configurations.

And my AWS bill ever starts climbing, I will just self host once again.

Sometimes I think I am out of the loop for using dedicated servers like OVH, DigitalOcean, and Hetzner, while others spend thousands of dollars for the things I spend barely a few hundred. This always made me think I am not a good developer enough to know the cutting-edge things others know.

Turns out most of the developers suck at handling barebones with a Linux distro + nginx and some other plugins to do the same things as the fancy-named aws stuff. If you are in the same boat, just know that most of these developers suck at what they are doing and don't care about the company budget.

You can get 99.99% of the things done with barebone + Cloudflare, including multiserver redundancy, at a fraction of AWS and Azure costs. Most of these technologies are just fancy words for basic Linux services.

This isn’t a binary issue. I disagree with these “abandon the cloud” takes but do agree that most folks spend way way more than they should.

The biggest threat to cloud vendors is that everyone wakes up tomorrow and cost optimizes the crap out of their infrastructure. I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to say that global cloud spending could drop by 50% in 3 months if everyone just did a good audit and cleaned up their deployments.

Not trying to be dismissive of the article but, the way it's written, it reads like a lot of whining.

He could have summed up with "AWS is expensive, host your own server instead".

I would really be interested in an actual comparison, where e.g. someone compares the full TCO of a mysql server with backup, hot standby in another data center and admin costs.

On AWS an Aurora RDS is not cheap. But I don't have to spend time or money on an admin.

Is the cost justified? Because that's what cloud is. Not even talking about the level of compliance I get from having every layer encrypted when my hosted box is just a screwdriver away from data getting out the old school way.

When I'm small enough or big enough, self managed makes sense and probably is cheaper. But when getting the right people with enough redundancy and knowledge is getting the expensive part...

But actually - I've never seen this in any if these arguments so far. Probably because actual time required to manage a db server is really unpredictable.

The irony is that I went to read this article and encountered the Cloudflare error "521: Web server is down".

I have a VPS. It costs me £1.34 per month. It's way over-powered for what I need it for.

However, one situation where I think the cloud might be useful is for archive storage. I did a comparison between AWS Glacier Deep Storage and local many-hard-drive boxes, for storing PB-scale backups, and AWS just squeaked in as slightly cheaper, but only because you only pay for the amount you use, whereas if you buy a box then you have to pay for the unused space. And it's off-site, which is a resilience advantage. And the defrosting/downloading charge was acceptable at effectively 2.5 months worth of storage. However, at smaller scales you would probably win with a small NAS, and at larger scales you'd be able to set up a tape library and fairly comprehensively beat AWS for price.

I've been at too many startups with a devops team that would rather provision 15 machines with 4GB RAM THAN ONE WITH 64GB.

I once got into an argument with a lead architect about it and it's really easy to twist the conversation into "don't you think we'll reach that scale?" To justify complexity.

The bottom line is for better or worse, the cloud and micro services are keeping a lot of jobs relevant and there's no benefit in convincing people otherwise

> To them, it’s way too convenient to be on AWS: not only it solves their problem, but it’s also a shiny object. It’s technically complex, it makes them look smart in front of other devs, it creates dependencies and lock-in effects so they’re not easily replaceable as employees, and most importantly – being on the cloud yields them a fat paycheck at the end of the month.

I recently read a fantastic comment or article on how developers, and IT workers in general, will be the first to be automated away, and groups like lawyers and doctors the last, entirely unrelated to how good LLMs and other AI models are at the specific tasks of each. Reason being that developers fall over themselves to prove how productive they are, happy to use all these tools. Anywhere else is concerned with job protection first and foremost. Metrics like SLOC having come from devs themselves in the chase of a raise.

This paragraph reminds me of that so much. Calling out those who push the cloud for job security. In basically every other sector - where this kind of behavior is 10x more prevalent - no one calls this out, there's a sense of solidarity and mutual understanding that this kind of thing is necessary.

This isn't judging one or the other to be good or bad. But it's going to cost devs very dearly.

I don't remember where I read it, they put it much better than I can - if anyone here recognizes it please drop a link.

I see articles likes these popping up recently quite a bit.

I love it!

FUCK CLOUD!

yet another obsessive take on "cloud is bad and expensive" eh? I think they vastly forget the value of some SaaS offerings in terms of time saving for small companies. running and managing numerous DBs, k8s clusters, ci/cd pipelines and stateless container systems is simply impossible with a team of 1-2 people. sure if the setup is simple and only requires a few classic components, this is way cheaper and for a 99.9% SLA will work fine. otherwise it only makes sense if you had very large cloud bills and can dedicate multiple engineers to the newly created tasks.

Up to a point, cloud can actually be very cost effective. If you are a small company, you don't actually need a lot. I ran our current service for almost one and a half year on Google Cloud Run for free. It stayed below the freemium threshold. Eventually I transitioned it over to two simple VMs. Main reason for this was that I abused these servers to also do background processing and Cloud Run is not very suitable for that as it can shut down servers in between requests and/or starve them of resources. But a small vm only costs something like 20$/month. Add another 25 or so for the load balancer and a Redis, and a few other bits and we're looking at ~100$ per month. That's very reasonable. That's not a cost worth optimizing without a very good reason. A good devops freelance person asks more per hour than that.

Where a lot of companies go wrong is premature scaling and overengineering. As you might guess from the above, I don't run kubernetes. Reason, the smallest cluster I can manage would probably be more expensive than the entirety of my setup. Before I even deploy anything. And it might not be big enough even.

I also don't run a managed postgresql. I'd like to. But I can't justify dropping north of 300$/month on that currently. A single node vm with backups is good enough. For now. I might go active master - passive master. Do I need a 3 or more node cluster? Not right now. I might one day. I always have the option to upgrade. But until then my DB is going to not break the bank. So, I run with a more modest/risky setup. It's a managed risk. I can buy it off when that becomes relevant.

The other day, our CEO vibe coded a cost calculator thingy. He did a nice job. It had to be deployed somewhere. So, I used Cloud Run. Running a small thing with essentially no traffic is as close to free as you can get. I slapped some basic authentication on it and used a git hub action that we run from the freemium allocated build minutes each month. I reviewed our Github bills a few days ago over the years: The most we payed was a few months where we were running out of build minutes in 2024. I payed 55cents for one of those bills. Our setup is cloud based but frugal. I could probably lower our bills by double digit percentages by moving everything into Hetzner. But it's literally not worth my time.

Cloud on the cheap is just really good value. You can host low traffic static websites on Cloudflare. If you have a load balancer in Google cloud (25$/month or so) you can use buckets and their CDN for next to nothing as an alternative. A small Redis costs next to nothing. We run a slightly expensive vm for batch jobs for a maybe ~2 hours per month in total. Each job only takes a few minutes. The machine is suspended in between jobs and we only pay for the hours it runs. Next to nothing.

So, yes, you can get some bare metal in Hetzner or wherever for next to nothing. But then you need to manage that setup and you need to put the time in to do that. Your time even if you don't value it personally is just about the most scarce and expensive resource a startup has if you are the CTO. The difference between you doing valuable work that moves the company forward or you procrastinating and penny pinching over stuff that does not matter can literally make or break the company.

If you spend 5K on infrastructure per month, that's a the same as a very low salary for a full time person. If you are spending that much, definitely do something because it's an obscene amount. Especially if you are early stage and have no traffic. But if you need to put somebody on that that costs closer to 10K/month for a few weeks or months, that's a project that has a pretty high price tag as well. So cutting 5K down to 1K is worth doing. But spending 10K to cut 1K to 500/month is probably going to take you years to earn back. And you lose time doing it.

Our startup is bootstrapped. We run on a bit of revenue now and our savings for most of the past five years. Anything I spend on stuff that isn't needed literally is money that otherwise would go to my bank account (via a salary raise or bonus). I understand frugality. A lot of this stuff is people getting spoiled with investor cash and spending like there is no tomorrow. If you have no accountability you optimize the infrastructure for how good it makes your resume look, not for cost.

Hetzner is great if you’re in Europe, is there an equivalent in the US or East Asia?

I'm not sold because:

1. "It’s difficult to say these things without coming across as arrogant, but I’ve been managing servers since 2006."

You have experience manager servers, so for you it's not a big deal. But maybe software developers who aren't devops don't want to worry about it and just want to write code and ship a project?

2. If you're launching a new product as a solo developer, isn't it faster to just build an MVP on the cloud, validate the idea, get some traction, and eventually migrate to cheaper hosting if you do become the x% that gets product/market fit and do need to scale?

3. "Look, first of all, you’re as unique as the other 1000 peanut gallery enjoyers that have made the same astute observation before you. Congratulations. But you’re absolutely missing the point."

What's with the tone? Is it supposed to be funny? Does it help getting the point across?

Another complement to easily moving data off cloud, check out https://github.com/slingdata-io/sling-cli. Use CLI, YAML or Python to run etl jobs.

Vercel is my favorite.. They charge you to pay for AWS.

Good topic, horrible ai emdash slop. There's so much fuss here that I wouldn't be surprised if it was just a prompt without any reviewing.

I'd much rather read an article to know when it's NOT relevant to switch. Someone other than "vendor/service lock-in". I already know that

> You’ve been scammed, likely not out of your own money, but your employer’s money – and that’s why you don’t give a crap.

No, I've ran the numbers, and in doing so, realized that EC2 is the wrong solution for most problems. If you use the correct solution the price is highly competitive with your servers. One of the reasons being, I do not need to maintain servers.. I did that for 25 years and I absolutely hate it. The amount of time I save, which my company pays for, is ridiculous. I get a powerful security model, a unified API for managing everything, and expertly managed runtimes.

You're acting as if people only making $4k/mo in salary are making these decisions. You've got startup brain. Come back down to earth and reassess your position.

> you’re looking to save for the long run. Well, turns out buying your own servers is even cheaper in a long enough time frame

Yet another process I don't have to waste time on. "Capital purchasing" is extremely annoying (by design) in every single organization I've ever worked for or consulted with.

Like most "cloud cost analysis" this is extremely shallow and is apparently based upon the supposed "virality" of a single tweet.

If you’re going to write a post about why self-hosting is better than cloud*, then it’s probably a good idea to make sure your site loads in under a minute.

* at least I assume what this post is; I’m still waiting for it to load.