Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by malwrar 1986 days ago
> why wouldn't you host it yourselves

Running a datacenter, especially at scale, is expensive as hell. Cloud is also expensive, but in return you get the ability to not need to think about hardware anymore. Prior to last week they probably assumed that AWS et. al. wouldn't have just suddenly cut them off, so they didn't factor in that risk except as a distant possibility. Up until a week ago we all were scared of FAATG's power after all and people were still talking about breaking them up.
1 comments
TheRealDunkirk 1986 days ago
> Running a datacenter, especially at scale, is expensive as hell.

I helped build one out, which was later acquired, but I wouldn't think it would take more than a couple of cages of equipment in a colo facility to host Parler, especially in these relatively early days. Maybe I'm completely out of touch.

link
malwrar 1986 days ago
I suppose it depends on what their backend actually looks like. Someone quoted in the data leak thread that they spent ~300k/mo on AWS which suggests they're definitely past a few cages of equipment. Who knows though, AWS charges insane rates for the privilege of not needing to think about hardware and making trivial difficult problems like establishing geographic presence or redundancy across datacenters. Parler is probably going to eventually need to self host anyways though, and then we'll see what a popular website will look like when it goes back to doing things the old fashioned way.
link