[joefourier]

Dedicated hosting is much better bang for your buck, especially for bandwidth. If you do something like video streaming and have relatively predictable loads, I've found that you have to pay at least an order of magnitude more with public cloud compared to dedicated servers on OVH or Datapacket. Maxing out a 2gbps server on Datapacket would cost you just $320/month for 648 TB of outgoing bandwidth monthly, versus at least $6,480 just for the bandwidth on Amazon S3.

For venture-backed startups with an emphasis on growth or large scale enterprises, the convenience of the cloud may outweigh the cost premium. But for small to medium size organizations where server load doesn't fluctuate on a day-to-day basis, I haven't yet been convinced that the cloud offers a good enough value proposition.

[chx]

It's not just bandwidth -- if you are not utilizing the various services of a cloud provider just use it as a glorified VPS (which many do) then it's really hard to beat dedicated providers like those you mentioned and then Incero or Dedispec -- Incero has an E3-1230, 16GB RAM, 2x 1TB HDD 2x 120GB SSD, 30TB transfer for $40, Dedispec has a E3-1230v2, 32GB RAM, 480GB SSD, 100TB transfer for $55. A real lot of websites would run just fine with servers like these. The major selling point of clouds of easy scaling often turns out not to be necessary with machines at these price points -- one machine is just enough.

[aantix]

If you look at something like WholesaleInternet, their offerings are even cheaper. (96gb of ram with a 1tb ssd drive for $100).

If daily backups are enough it can’t be beat.

[ChicagoDave]

Even if you're running everything else serverless and have no compute time at all?

I know a VOD training service runs serverless with videos on S3 and they're very successful.

[vidarh]

Bandwidth on S3 costs something like 50x what I'm usually paying for bandwidth (Hetzner etc.) or 5x what you'll get from smaller cloud providers.

You can be successful on AWS, but you're leaving money on the table, and for relatively commodity services it's just a question of time before a competitor realise they can do the same with much better margins and lower prices elsewhere.

If your hosting is a small portion of your costs, that might not matter, so I have certainly run services on AWS too, and do in my current job as well, but it's a very expensive convenience. I've yet to come across any systems I know the internals off that couldn't cut hosting costs by moving off public cloud services.

[mseebach]

The "commodity" distinction feel very significant here. Parent mentioned training videos, so probably very much not commodity. If you're selling something at $10/unit, it doesn't matter if your bandwidth costs are ¢0.05 or ¢2.5/unit. You're technically leaving money on the table, yes, but probably not enough to justify the added infrastructure complexity.

[vidarh]

> but probably not enough to justify the added infrastructure complexity.

If you want to avoid infrastructure complexity, I'd go for dedicated hosting most of the time. Most of my past clients have ended up paying for more hours on operations for AWS setups than for dedicated. AWS and similar tends to force a lot of ceremony, some of which is good, but a lot of which is unnecessary on dedicated setups or on premises setups.

But yes, if your costs per unit are that low, I've typically told clients it largely depends on what they're most comfortable with. Some then pick AWS and it's a perfectly good choice.

What I'm seeing though, is that a lot of people pick AWS without first pricing out the options, and then later end up with expensive migrations to get off it.

[mseebach]

Yes, of course. "Added complexity" was meant in the context of already having decided that the AWS ecosystem is valuable (parent mentioned running serverless, so presumably that is the case).

[apple4ever]

> AWS and similar tends to force a lot of ceremony

Oh if that isn’t a perfect description of AWS I don’t know what is. Every time I look at AWS, that’s what I discover.

[WhiteOwlLion]

Some businesses don't have IT staff or technical individuals, so cloud ends up being this nebulous resource that just works. Dedicated server means you are comfortable setting up your own servers to some extent. I agree with the comments thus far, you just need to be one of the technical people to appreciate the difference between cloud vs dedicated.

[vidarh]

If it's one thing cloud services does not do, it is "just work". Companies lacking IT staff is a bonanza for devops consultants.

The difference is minimal these days, but usually my experience is that people spend more on devops for AWS. If you want to spin up a dedicated host at e.g. Hetzner or OVH or Softlayer or wherever, it generally take no more or less effort or technical skills than spinning up an instance at AWS. Many of the hosting providers have API's, just like AWS, only they expose their bare metal instead of hypervisor interfaces.

You don't typically need to know any more about the hardware on those systems than you need to know about the virtualized hardware on AWS.

[nvivo]

I don't have the numbers here, but I'm pretty sure the same idea applies for serverless. If you have a predictable load, you can always find a much cheaper alternative once you pass a certain threshold. The cloud is never about cost, it's about flexibility.

[repsilat]

Predictable or flat/consistent? If my load is negligible in US weekends and outside of business hours, that's a factor of 2 or 3 you can theoretically save over baseline=peak with some "cloud on demand" service.

It's not an order of magnitude, but it's something. Probably not worth the effort, for most, though, and I have no idea if "dedicated box" services can approximate something similar.

[nvivo]

If you have a small number of requests over a large period, serverless is cheaper (that includes an api that is idle most of the time and peaks at a very high rate occasionally).

But once you go live and start to grow, there is a point where the lambda cost equals the instance price. And with an instance, you can almost always do a lot more than that number. Again, that will work if your requests are predictable enough that you can see this number consistently over a large period, say, every week at least.

[ddorian43]

A dedicated box would for example handle that traffic at all times and still be cheaper. Dedicated servers are 3x+ cheaper.

[toomuchtodo]

If you're running everything serverless at high volume, you're getting raked over the coals on compute. Dev time is expensive, but not that expensive.