| > Most VPS providers tick most of the boxes on your list, so I'm not sure what you're on about. Which VPS provider are you talking about specifically? > Plus what is the point of scaling when you're losing money at any scale? My point is that I'm not losing money. I'm saving money by transferring unpredictable salary costs into predictable server costs. > I run a site with roughly 2 million monthly visitors. On AWS it would cost me $20,000/month on traffic alone. If this is a static site, 2 million monthly visitors on AWS would cost less than $5. If it's a non-static site and none of those 2 million visits are cached, I still can't begin to imagine what your app is doing that it could possibly cost you $20,000/month. That would buy you a huge fleet of servers (something like 200 mid-to-large EC2 instances). It doesn't sound like you have a sense of what AWS costs, even within an order of magnitude. > Instead I run it on 4 dedicated servers and a bunch of VPS, costing me around $500/month all-in-all. Four medium EC2 instances also cost ~$500/month all-in, so you're seemingly saving nothing. The layers of software on top of the (virtual) hardware are free. |
Take any major one like OVH.
> If this is a static site, 2 million monthly visitors on AWS would cost less than $5.
If this was a static site I could run it for free. But it's not.
> Four medium EC2 instances.
That's not even a close to the specs of the dedicated servers I am using, nor is the site "just" those four servers. Those $500 include everything from domains to backups, to various back- and front-end VPS.
>I still can't begin to imagine what your app is doing that it could possibly cost you $20,000/month.
I just told you. The egress traffic alone would cost me that much.
Look up what 500TB-1000TB of egress traffic would cost me on AWS. Last I checked it was easily north of $20,000 even with their volume discounts.
Meanwhile I can buy dedicated servers with 1Gbps dedicated and unmetered bandwidth for 60-70 bucks/month nowadays, and I won't have to worry about paying a dollar more - and certainly not thousands of dollars.
And no it's not the kind of traffic you can just run through a CDN. I would if it'd make sense. In fact I already use Cloudflare for those areas where it makes sense - shaves off around 100TB.