[adim86]

I will chip in here. Although I agree with all that you guys have said. Your comments seem to be skewed to a perspective that all companies are being run in U.S.A, Canada, Germany, etc very developed countries where power is constant and can be relied on. The skilled labor to run these servers is available for hire. The parts and infrastructure are available to rent or buy. Majority of the world is not like this but there are formidable companies all over the world running, and for them, this is one less unreliable aspect of their company.

To give you an idea, if you want to run a data center or your own servers in some countries you need a standby generator (because electricity is not a given) and the Diesel used to run these generators are imported and the economy of these countries is shaky so the exchange rate fluctuates, so suddenly the cost to keep your site up becomes a variable and is now subject to government announcements (not even in an evil authoritarian way), policies and import taxes. In the face of all of this, having a steady AWS bill with reliable infrastructure becomes priceless to these companies

[ATsch]

You wouldn't run your own datacenter, you would colocate. Even if that's not possible, you can still rent servers for significantly cheaper than cloud offerings.

[Accujack]

Wow... really a first world perspective here.

[blaser-waffle]

The you co-locate to the first world. Or somewhere that can get a data center built with resources that you trust.

I ran data centers for a living in Northern VA and had all sorts of international clients. Egyptian schools who rented servers, Brazilian Protestant ministries who shipped servers to us, etc. There were some decent data centers in Mumbai we had to get VPNs built for, and we had a least one legit client in Lagos, Nigeria.

[iajrz]

3rd world perspective: They're not far off from the mark.

You'd want to co-locate with ISP who already has infrastructure for continuous services through blackouts et al, or you could have a datacenter if it's small-ish, because you already have some infrastructure to keep operating during blackouts.

[troupe]

I believe you are saying that some countries don't have data centers where you can co-locate. Most of the places where AWS has a datacenter have other datacenter companies that offer co-location.

[ATsch]

I think you'll struggle to find any place without a few datacenters nearby, at least in a neighboring country. Of course it's going to be a bit further away if you're in central Africa.

Even then, you can colocate in a datacenter anywhere you want, have equipment delivered there and pay remote hands to install it for you for a very reasonable fee.

Of course this doesn't make sense if you just want a small webserver, but that's not who we are talking about here.

[kuschku]

If you can rent an AWS server, you can also rent a Hetzner server, or put some servers in a Hetzner DC.

[irishcoffee]

So its true [0]

[0] https://pics.me.me/me-i-prefer-mangoes-to-oranges-random-per...

[Hnrobert42]

I support your comment.

[WilliamEdward]

You nailed it. The infrastructure in developed countries is taken for granted by its consumers. Websites are often not tuned for low speed internet, or for people across the ocean, because everything works so smooth in developed countries. Also, having a server that serves to the US and Europe if you live in a remote area obviously cannot be on-premise, it has to be in the cloud served in those countries for latency reasons.

And you cannot have a website that doesn't cater to US and EU users, unless the website only solves local problems.

[mD5pPxMcS6fVWKE]

If web site caters to EU customers, just rent it from the EU datacenter, no need for a cloud. A Hetzner server costs $100/month, an equivalent amount of cloud resources will run you into thousands.

[tekknik]

And how much does Hetzners nosql/relational db, emr solution, faas, etc cost? Solutions aren’t built the traditional way anymore. You don’t go get some cots server and write everything yourself. So while you’re futzing around getting a database installed, tuned and setup the engineer using a more complete cloud platform has already moved onto business logic.

[mD5pPxMcS6fVWKE]

The person above wrote that she can't use local server to cater to US and EU customers. I pointed out that you don't need cloud to resolve that problem.

[tekknik]

Hetzner is a cloud, as per their own literature but my point being if you buy Hetzner you’re not getting a complete platform. You are buying into a platform just less of one. Hetzner also advertises themselves as thrifty, not exactly instilling confidence for critical infrastructures. My point remains though, buying a VPS is equivalent to an EC2 and this is not how things are built these days. Also note the posters name is WilliamEdwards, I know if you called me a she (I’m a he) it would be very offensive to me. It’s best to use gender neutral or pay attention to sex/identity if possible (not really here) and use the correct pronoun.

[mD5pPxMcS6fVWKE]

VPS is in no way equivalent to an EC2

[iajrz]

Even so, having say a bare metal server (à la Vultr) can be way cheaper than having a cloud setup in one of the most flexible kinds of providers.

The detail to look at is that flexibility is a feature of the cloud offering, and an expensive one at that. If you don't need it, you need to find a way to not pay for it.