[rb808]

Buying your own Physical hardware is so cheap now its crazy. A commodity Ryzen 16 vCPU box is about the same price as 2 months rent on EC2.

I get maintenance, electricity and bandwidth isn't free but I honestly thought cloud server prices would be much lower by now. No wonder AWS is making huge profits.

[jpalomaki]

Check the prices for example on Hezner or some other company which provides dedicated boxes. They are totally different from big cloud. Like 6 cores and 256GB memory for 150€/month (one older server I have there).

Of course these don’t scale dynamically. And you don’t just create copied of the servers. And they don’t have 100 security certifications like Azure/AWS. And no data centers in every jurisdiction.

[rumanator]

> Like 6 cores and 256GB memory for 150€/month (one older server I have there).

As I've mentioned in another post, Hetzner also sells for less than 50€/month dedicated hosts with 64GB of RAM running an Intel i7 6700 professor (4 cores, 8threads).

With that you also get unlimited network traffic over a dedicated 1Gb connection.

[Bombthecat]

Vultr has servers with pci certification.

[tanilama]

AWS is so much more than just hardware

It is called service for a reason.

[rumanator]

With AWS you also pay for much more than just hardware.

Even when compared with other cloud providers, AWS is super expensive.

The only interesting service that AWS provides is the ability to host your services globally through multiple availability zones, but unless you need to provide a global service with low latency everywhere in the globe then that's just not worth the time and money.

[tanilama]

> Even when compared with other cloud providers, AWS is super expensive.

Well this is not true. I don't think Azure is much cheaper in that regard. In reality, the big clouds are watching each other very closely. Do you have data other than anecdote evidence?

Also if you are big enough, you can negotiate better deal with AWS separately, and I believe that is the norm.

Disclaimer: I worked at AWS before.

[rumanator]

> Do you have data other than anecdote evidence?

Why, yes. Take Hetzner for example. With their Hetzner cloud offering you get, say, 1vCPU with 2GB of RAM and 2TB of traffic for 3€/month. For an instance with 2vCPUs yo pay about 4.15€.

For an equivalent EC2 instance (t3.small) you pay about 5x the price, and you still need to pay additional costs such as egress charges.

Heck, with Hetzner you can spend less than 50€/month and get a dedicated box with 64GB of RAM and 4 real cores with free unlimited traffic over a dedicated 1Gb connection.

It isn't even up for debate: AWS price-gouges their customers. Unless you have a very particular need to deploy an application globally, it's very hard to defend paying AWS's cost.

[votepaunchy]

The Hetzer-equivalent service is Amazon Lightsail, which starts at $3.50 a month ($5 for 2TB transfer) and has access to all AWS services.

[rumanator]

> The Hetzer-equivalent service is Amazon Lightsail,

No it isn't. Hetzner provides full blown linux instances with 2GB of RAM, while the Ligthsail instance type you're trying to compare has a barely workable 512MB of RAM. That's the equivalent of a meager Orange Pi Zero.

The Lightsail instance type that is equivalent to Hetzner's 4€/month instance is sold for 20€/month.

[DmitryOlshansky]

It’s buy vs build but with people being routinely misled about how much it costs to build and the fact that it doesn’t have to be all or nothing.

Some companies are making billions of dollars, that’s why we see so much content about the cloud and very few about building your own cloud with dedicated providers, which by the way handle electricity, network and basic hardware maintenance for pennies compared to cloud guys. They even have some basic managed services like backups, S3-compatible storage etc. these days.

[kilbuz]

For me, not having to worry about the "where" and "how" related to physical placement and connection of that Ryzen box is worth the premium and then some.

[latch]

Then use a dedicated provider. You won't save as much, but in raw costs, you'll be about 2x ahead and in cost/performance you'll be 4x-8x (much more if you're a heavy bandwidth user, and much much more if proper hardware lets you scale vertically rather than prematurely having to scale horizontally).

[phamilton]

Could someone a little more familiar with buying their own hardware tell me how much hardware equivalent to a c5.12xlarge (48 cores, 96 GB) would cost?

Spot prices are around $0.80/hr, which puts total compute cost at $7k/yr.

On demand is $2.04/hr ($17k/yr), reserved is 1.20/hr ($10k/yr).

[reacharavindh]

Not exactly what you asked for. But, we bought an AMD server to test at our HPC cluster. AMD EPYC 7302P (16cores, 32 threads), 512 GiB of 3200 MHZ RDIMM, 10GBE, 3.2TiB of 12Gbps SAS SSD. It came out to be approx 48000 DKK (excluding VAT). That is approx. $7000. Fewer cores machine with faster clocks and we mostly use it for its memory channels(8).

Our typical buy - 2 socket intel cascade lake Xeon Gold 6256(12 Cores, 24 threads) with 768 GiB of RDIMM costs us approx. 70000 DKK or $10200.

The biggest cost here is memory. Just to give you an idea.

[ksec]

I was just thinking the other day when HN were discussion Cloud vs Metal. How little has the DRAM prices changed in the past 10 years. While CPU core went from 10 to 64 Core, ( Not exactly Moores's law at least it is 6.4x the difference ). DRAM median prices has remain mostly flat until recently, we finally got pass $10 /GB ECC RAM and are now close to $5/GB. Which is still very expensive.

SLC NAND SSD could be had for $0.4/GB, I failed to see why DRAM should be priced at 10x higher.

[gravypod]

Current gen hardware is about 10-15k. If you buy used or legacy hardware (like what c5 runs on) you can get much more bang for buck.

Here's an eBay listing for 2 machines with similar CPU config for 400+shipping: https://www.ebay.com/itm/INTEL-COMPUTER-48-CORE-DUAL-XEON-24...

Buyer be wear but there are deals to be had. That said purchasing the hardware is step one. Setting up PXE, network storage, cluster mgmt, recycling and upgrade, etc is a full time job passed a specific scale.

[latch]

Not colocated, but in the US, you can find a dual EPYC 7742 (64 cores) with 512GB of ram (with ssds, hdds, and bandwidth included) for $1000/m.

This should absolutely demolish the c5.12xlarge, especially if you need any disk IO or bandwidth.

Or from a different provider, a Dual Epyc 7281 (32 cores) with 256GB (and ssds, hdds and bandwith included) for $400/m.

You can get cheaper if you're willing to host in Europe. And this is dedicated, so no additional power or storage or maintenance cost. Stuff breaks, they replace it. Also, your commitment is 1 month.

[developer2]

To add context to the downvotes you've acquired: I didn't downvote you, but I think I understand why others did. Your parent comment was asking about 96 GB of RAM, and you posted a reply talking about 512 RAM. I suspect others thought you were talking about 512 MB (ie. 0.5 GB of RAM, which is common in very cheap hosting) rather than the 512 GB of RAM you actually commented on. When I first read your comment, I admit I first saw "512 MB", but you quite clearly wrote "512 GB".

tldr; The number "512" when talked about in the context of RAM is assumed to be measured in MB, but 512 GB is also a less-commonly-encountered amount of RAM. :)

[rb808]

Yeah for big iron EC2 makes more sense. Still you can find similar eg this refurbished for 6k https://outlet.us.dell.com/ARBOnlineSales/Online/SecondaryIn...

[aldkj32]

mhm, interesting question... i am not dabbing in the server space just in consumer hardware...

1x ryzen 3990x with 64 cores(128 vcores) would be 4k € 1x a mainboard ~0,5k € 1x 128 GB RAM ~ 0,7k € Storage, whatever you need 0.5k case + power supply 0.3k

so 6k all around for a much higher perfomance pc...

a ryzen 24cores(48vcores) ~ 1k 1x a mainboard ~0,3k 1x 96GB Ram ~0,5k Storage, whatever you need 0.5k case + power supply 0.3k

so 2.6 k should be around the same in raw consumer hardware

[rumanator]

Not the same as buying hardware, but Hetzner offers dedicated AMD Epyc 7502p instances (32 cores, 128GB RAM, free egress) for less than 150€/month.

So you can just get somewhere between 5 to 7 of those instances for the price you're paying for your single EC2 instance.