Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by pchm 1489 days ago
So the price increase for the managed database is... 100%? Currently paying $240/mo for 16 GB RAM / 6vCPU / 270 GB Disk. The new price is $480/mo.

We have a bunch of these databases at work, so I'm sure we'll be considering other providers now.

6 comments

The prices only change if you have additional nodes. If you don't, the pricing doesn't change.
Hah, for 230 euro I run 160GB RAM, 2x512Gb + 2x3.8TB NVMe, AMD Epyc 32 cores CPU on Hetzner.

Not saying you should do the same, just was a bit shocked and decided to share.

A server is not a managed database
Agree. Still the price hugely differs.
I don't know why it is convenient to ignore the "managed" aspect of it.

DO's or AWS's managed databases do more than just stick it on an server VM. It has a firewall built it, replicas, backups, logs, API access to manage it, etc.

The reason why these managed database services even exist is because people are willing to pay for it. It provides them value. If it didn't, they'd stop working on them.

Dang, what are you doing with all that power?
Processing web requests & some reports, pretty much the same as everyone do nowdays. Dev team add some features, but still on scale it the same - web requests and reports.

CPU is pretty much idling, like ~ 10-15% used on average, in spikes may be 20%. But that's minimal CPU hoster gives with RAM 128GB+ platform, so using it.

RAM (~ 110GB) obviously used for DB and the for auxilary tasks. DB itself is medium sized, with raw data ~ 1.5TB yet DISK IO on average is pretty high, around 55%, with often spikes to 100%, that part I'd add more IOPS on if response times grow above the limits.

I so badly wanted to use their managed databases, but they priced me out of it. It's so much cheaper just to manage the database myself, and thus far at least not that much more effort.
I think this is probably the right positioning for anyone's decision on managed database vs. running it yourself, or any cloud managed product for that matter.

If you feel you either don't need the managed offerings and/or can manage it to a point where you're spending less of you or your company's time resources on it, then by all means manage it yourself.

If the managed-ness of the cloud offerings are a high enough value for you, then you will pay for it.

Creating, maintaining, constantly upgrading and improving a managed database product takes a hell of a lot of expensive engineer hours. It's probably a better bet for cloud providers to have relatively fewer high-margin customers on that product than they would if they tried to squeeze margins to compete with "I can provision a VM and install Postgres myself" which is also a product they already offer - just buy the VM.

AWS RDS is significantly cheaper
And that is ridiciously expensive imo haha ;)

tbf, its about 2x the EC2 instance cost, so I guess is actually kinda reasonable for a kinda managed service.

But the (backup) storage is really how they get you in my experience. And do not turn on auto growth for diskspace, it will just grow to the limit and then you are paying for 200GB of daily backup storage you are not even using.

I think it's because they included an additional node in the price by default. So it's double because they have a read only node added in there, the price for managed DBs doesn't seem to have changed mostly.
yeah this one was really bad