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by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 1099 days ago
I've been using a cax41 (16 cores) instance for numerical computations recently. Geekbench scores are 774/10221, costs $0.04 hourly ($27 monthly). Perfectly stable. No throttling (probably not that popular yet hehe). For my specific program it's 10% slower than my laptop's 11980HK processor (8 threads, 16 hyperthreads).
1 comments
nikita2206 1099 days ago
I’m always so taken aback when I compare VM prices from Hetzner/OVH and AWS/GCP.

Similarly sized machine in AWS seems to be around $300 monthly, that’s 10x cost.

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jeroenhd 1098 days ago
Amazon/Google has fallbacks across regions, several layers of data storage redundancy, high-speed. highly configurable software based networking and so much more.

Hetzner/OVH has machines with almost no failover, with no extra availability zones, with no backup guarantees, very little in the way of custom networking, and doesn't integrate with dev tools quite as much.

They're different products. For most people, going Amazon/Google makes no sense. However, if you absolutely MUST keep your data available after or during a fire [0] and keep your systems running during datacenter downtime, you're better off with AWS/GCP/Azure. SLAs with many nines can't afford cheap servers, and that's where the big cloud providers make a lot of money.

Up until recently I saw a lot of people and companies move back from the cloud to self-managed dedicated hardware in data centers. All most companies need is half a rack in two places and a competent sysadmin team, but externalizing the risks is often attractive because disasters and bad failovers do happen sometimes.

[0]: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/opinions/ovhclouds-dat...

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nikita2206 1098 days ago
Absolutely no arguing that AWS adds more value.

Another thing about AWS/GCP, they are also good at locking you in. For example you want to shift some workloads to Hetzner while leaving others in AWS, you will get a bill for egress out of AWS.

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EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 1098 days ago
>> many nines can't afford cheap servers

I wouldn't say Ampere Altras are cheaper or worse servers than AWS's Gravitons. And many nines is a fiction anyway. For example, Google Maps had two prolonged downtimes in 2022.

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