[wongarsu]

If we are talking about serving files publicly I'd go with the €40 server for flexibility (the storage boxes are kind of limited), but still get a €20 Storage Box to have a backup of the data. Then add more servers as bandwidth and redundancy requires.

But if splitting your traffic across multiple servers is possible you can also get the €20 storage box and put a couple Hetzner Cloud servers with a caching reverse proxy in front (that's like 10 lines of Nginx config). The cheapest Hetzner Cloud option is the CAX11 with 4GB RAM, 40GB SSD and 20TB traffic for €3,79. Six of those plus the Storage Box gives you the traffic you need, lots of bandwidth for usage peaks, SSD cache for frequently requested files, and easily upgradable storage in the Storage Box, all for €42. Also scales well at $3,79 for every additional 20TB traffic, or $1/TB if you forget and pay fees for the excess traffic instead.

You will be babysitting this more than the $150/month cloudflare solution, but even if you factor in the cost of your time you should come out ahead.

[dinvlad]

Exactly, and also you get to actually understand how it all works together, unlike a bunch of proprietary APIs that only tie you to their particular platform.

(for those not on the same page, I’m talking from a position of substantial experience with all 3 major clouds)

Plus, these days the maintenance burden of the OS layer is really heavily overstated. With certain self-updating open-source container OSes one doesn’t even really have to think about patches and all that ancient crap.

The real appeal of the big players in my mind is only in one use case - scale. If you need 10k servers for heavy “big” data processing like in genomics or ‘AI’ (whatever that means), only then they start to be indisposable. Otherwise, the considerable burden of training all personnel on proprietary APIs is just not worth it - it literally costs less to buy and configure your own system (or a traditional VPS or dedicated server). Cloud architects ain’t cheap!

[aledalgrande]

> even if you factor in the cost of your time you should come out ahead

There is always the hidden cost of not spending time on activities that are core to your business (if this is indeed for a business) that would make multiples of the money CF costs you.

[midasuni]

Yup. Managing the CF account is a hidden cost you need to account for.

[j45]

There is more and more that can be done like proxmox to help make self hosted as much as an appliance as anything else.

[dinvlad]

That, and also NixOS - I’m discovering it for myself now, and it’s been a revelation! Configuring absolutely everything declaratively from scratch, even the disk partitions - a dream for reproducibility. It even has configurable “micro-VMs”, which would not be as easy to do via Proxmox (not counting LXC), since they would have to be built manually. Though Proxmox does have some nice benefits over it as well, especially considering their ecosystem with PBS, mail server etc

[j45]

Thanks for the intro to NixOS. I was trying to remember one I had seen & forgotten and I think this may have been it.

I have been playing more and more with UTM in the Mac world and it's encouraging how mature it seems already and hopefully can be picked up into NixOS, Sandstorm, etc.

I like proxmox more personally, however have changed my stance recently where nix and sandstorm could just be run in a proxmox vm and then provide more of an IaaS role. The newer versions of ProxMox are even easier and they were pretty OK the past 5-7 years.