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by api 1668 days ago
It’s absolutely insane compared with what bare metal providers charge.
2 comments

But that's apples and oranges... With AWS you get VPCs, Security Groups, NACLs, flow logs, DDoS protection (limited), public IPv4s, custom hardware to make sure you can actually use the 10/40/100Gbps pipe on your server, etc. etc. for "free" ( you only pay for those via bandwidth). The best most bare metal providers have is a firewall(security groups), and that's it.
I can get all the things you stated, including "unlimited" bandwidth for a few bucks a month if I just rent a VPS. I never understood the flocking to AWS. Does nobody like running a server anymore?
> I never understood the flocking to AWS.

Nobody ever got fired for using AWS.

BTW you don't need to "run your own server" per se on the bare metal or VPS providers. You can auto-provision with Terraform, run Kubernetes or Nomad/Consul, etc. You have to do some work to set up your templates and the environment you will use but once it's created you can stamp out copies of it endlessly.

There are cases where AWS et. al. make sense. The bottom line is that you need to do your own spreadsheets modeling your own workload and compare costs. Include extra labor for managing your own stuff and compare it to the added costs of AWS.

What you'll often find is that AWS and such are cheaper at a small to medium scale and DIY becomes cheaper (sometimes radically so) at larger scale.

I don't like being bound to a particular machine (including indirectly via a VM) and having to manually intervene if something goes wrong with that machine. AWS auto scaling, and the equivalent feature from the other big cloud providers, frees me from that.
Most VPS providers don't have VPCs ( private network for all your VPS), or flow logs, and charge you for extra public IPs.
what do bare metal providers charge
Just as an example: Hetzner's dedicated servers, which start around US$30/month, come with unlimited 1gbit connections (really unlimited, not "unlimited until we decide to throttle you").

If you max out that connection non-stop, you can push about 330 TB/month. The same amount of bandwidth from EC2 would cost roughly US$20,000.

Dedicated servers from Hetzner and OVH is what I use. Very sweet deals they have.
Are you actually able to max that out to all network peers? Have you measured this? That sounds fantastic.
No direct experience with Hetzner but for DataPacket, OVH, and FDCservers the answer is yes.

These companies are still pretty profitable.

If you colocate your own hardware you can go even lower than the bare metal hosts.

https://www.hetzner.com/cloud gives you 20TB free bandwidth a month for all its servers, including its €3.49/mo VMs.

They also offer comparatively much cheaper hardware, which is why I've been using them for all my heavy workloads for 8+ years.

Most are unlimited. But the ones where you have an actual bandwidth cap, it comes out at less than $5/TB (if we're including the machine itself), the bandwidth itself, probably less than $1/TB
Some bare metal providers have allocation based on server provisioning rather than specific egress limits. But CloudFront is cheaper with commit pricing because CF commit pricing is very very cheap and you have to factor in the cost of said reverse proxy nodes and only so much can be delivered per node. As you factor in management of the nodes it becomes even more favorable to the hyper scaler like CloudFront.

I have seen large scale deals where CloudFront comes in cheaper than what the smaller CDNs built on bare mantel can reasonably offer even with sizable commits.

Go to datapacket.com or hetzner.com for examples.

VPS providers like Vultr and Digital Ocean are a bit more but still a lot cheaper than the big three.

Bandwidth prices at the big clouds are ludicrously high.

$500/mo unlimited egress
These are not real numbers. I've tried the "free" and "unlimited" providers. They will drop you if you take them up on their offers.
Damn that is wild when you just look at the absolute figures. Really? Where? Hetzner or some other bare metal provider?