The true costs of hosting in the cloud [LWN.net]

The true costs of hosting in the cloud

Posted Feb 28, 2018 19:21 UTC (Wed) by flussence (guest, #85566)
Parent article: The true costs of hosting in the cloud

I have no experience with colo, but I did go shopping around for a dedicated server a while back. It turned out the small-medium AWS instances aren't cheaper than leasing bare metal, and if for any reason you need an extra IP address the AWS monthly cost quickly shoots off into the stratosphere while it's a one-off purchase elsewhere. (On that subject, are they still doing that insane server-side CGNAT thing instead of IPv6?)

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"!holy wars"

Posted Feb 28, 2018 19:57 UTC (Wed) by anarcat (subscriber, #66354) [Link]

So before people drive themselves up the wall about Amazon here, I would invite everyone to keep in mind the guidelines here: "Please try to be polite, respectful, and informative, and to provide a useful subject line". Or, in the words of the speaker:

I'm not here to start a holy war. There are true believers of the cloud, there are true believers of bare metal. We are not here to engage in a heated discussions about pros and cons of those. I'm here to talk about money. That is the main objective of this talk: to estimate how much it's going to cost. And all the technical advantages and disadvantages, well there are other talks where those [have been covered].

Also, nitpickers will certainly argue with the math Dyachuk has come up with: that would also be missing the point. This is just one model: if you prefer Dell servers instead of Supermicro or Linode instead of AWS, yes, those prices will change. It's an example, take it with a grain of salt.

Thank you and have a nice day! :)

The true costs of hosting in the cloud

Posted Mar 1, 2018 4:38 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

IPs on Amazon don't cost anything if they are used. Seriously, you can have tens of IPs and if they are attached to a running instance then you are not charged for them.

IPv6 is also fully supported in most regions.

The true costs of hosting in the cloud

Posted Mar 1, 2018 18:35 UTC (Thu) by sjfriedl (✭ supporter ✭, #10111) [Link] (3 responses)

> It turned out the small-medium AWS instances aren't cheaper than leasing bare metal

Which may be true only while it's running: what happens when that bare metal breaks and you're down for 2 hours waiting for remote hands or 4 days waiting for a new part?

It may be hard to put a dollar value on downtime, but it's probably not $0.

The true costs of hosting in the cloud

Posted Mar 2, 2018 1:47 UTC (Fri) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

Dealing with problems on bare metal have the full range of options available to implementing in amazon and some additional ones. The question is how much does it cost to implement those options starting from bare metal and how much does it cost to implement those solutions in AWS?

The true costs of hosting in the cloud

Posted May 3, 2018 23:38 UTC (Thu) by nicram (guest, #124147) [Link] (1 responses)

From my experience with AWS and Azure:
- System slow down to almost unusable state - 2 days for resolution very fast contact but slow fix
- Some ports become not accessible (changes in routers etc. infrastructure) - 4 days for resolution again fast contact.

They are not IT gods just highly trained monkeys with low salaries.

The true costs of hosting in the cloud

Posted May 4, 2018 20:54 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Couldn't you just relaunch instances?

The true costs of hosting in the cloud

Posted Mar 8, 2018 19:29 UTC (Thu) by seneca6 (guest, #63916) [Link]

I second the call for looking at dedicated servers. Between colocating and cloud, it can be a very viable option, especially if all you want is some VMs or containers and you have no great need for scalability. Here in France, I'm often surprised at how much cheaper dedicated servers can be (with best-effort traffic included in the fixed monthly fee!).

Concerning communities and small-scale servers: Some years ago, tutorials for self-hosting your web site popped up all over the net; right now, where dedicated servers - but without RAID disks or service level agreement - are available for ridiculous prices, I'd love to see the same wave of tutorials for fail-over database clusters or distributed filesystems! Of course they exist, but it's still not trivial to set up such systems. Self-hosting -> self-clustering!