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.

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'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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

"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/

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.

Fittingly, his website was hugged to death

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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...

> 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

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

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.

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.

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 FINALLY got everything off the cloud"

...

...

"P.S. follow me on Twitter"

So uh, not everything

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.

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.

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