[johnklos]

Yes, I did, of course.

Storage is MUCH cheaper when you colo, and bandwidth requirements are a large part of why you colocate instead of just running servers out of an office building that has at least two upstream connections.

I'm really curious what you think they're using now. Certainly you read the article... It says they're using bare metal servers. That's basically colo where the provider owns, but doesn't control, the hardware.

[timewizard]

> Storage is MUCH cheaper

Probably because it's not redundant or automatically backed up at any interval. The worst days of my life have been during hardware failures at colos.

[johnklos]

I'm puzzled about why you'd suggest such an obviously silly thing.

Purchased, fully redundant storage is MUCH cheaper than anything in the cloud when talking about any time frame of a year or more.

Obviously you can "rent" storage for a month for less than the cost of purchasing it, but only idiot startup CTOs try to argue a comparison like that.

Two sets of storage are still cheaper, and we all have rsync.

[timewizard]

> fully redundant storage

Does it automatically repair itself when it fails? Are you sure you're making a proper comparison?

> Two sets of storage are still cheaper, and we all have rsync.

Yes, you can in fact solve 90% of the problem with 10% of the effort, what's your plan for the rest of the problem? Just call in sick?

[johnklos]

I'm not sure what kind of point you're trying to make here, but you're a bit off on a tangent.

[bluGill]

NAS is cheap -truenas will sell you 200 TB systems for under $10k, and you can run your web server in a VM. Put second one in a different location and set them to up with the right backup and you have most of what you need. You can probably do much cheaper depending on your needs.

What I don't know is how to make your web servers failover graceful if one goes down (the really hard problem is if the internet splits so both servers are active and making changes). I assume other people still know how to do this.

With the likes of AWS they tell you the above comes free with just a monthly charge. Generally open source projects like having more control over the hardware (which has advantages and disadvantages) and so want to colo. They would probably be happy running in my basement (other than they don't trust me with admin access and I don't want to be admin - but perhaps a couple admins have the ability to do this).

[stonogo]

You are aware that backups and redundant storage existed before the cloud, right?

[timewizard]

You are aware that adding backups and redundancy increases the costs both in hardware an management, right? I mean, _of course_ you can do that, it's computing.

Perhaps the comparison should be apples to apples when thinking about price.

[johnklos]

You're handwaving. Anything can increase cost and complexity. Using Amazon S3 increases cost and complexity.

Set up two locations. Set up rsync. It's still cheaper than cloud storage by far, and that's even after paying yourself handsomely for the script that runs rsync.

[timewizard]

> You're handwaving.

I do not see any concrete data from you either. This is a forum. Typically we'd just call this a "conversation."

> Anything can increase cost and complexity. Using Amazon S3 increases cost and complexity.

Yes, and you get something in return for that cost and complexity, so do you care to map out the differences or are you just going to stick to your simple disagreement?

> Set up two locations. Set up rsync. It's still cheaper than cloud storage by far, and that's even after paying yourself handsomely for the script that runs rsync.

You forgot monitoring. You forgot that when this inevitably breaks I'm going to have to go fix it and that you can't schedule failures to only happen during working hours. You're ignoring more than you're considering.

[justinclift]

He's not really forgetting monitoring (etc). You'll still need monitoring in place regardless of whether you're monitoring your own servers (colo, etc) or monitoring Cloud servers.

And "when stuff breaks" happens regardless of whether you've chosen Cloud or to run your own servers. It all breaks on occasion (though hopefully rarely).

[johnklos]

Simple disagreements suffice. I don't have to make an argument for something just because you bring it up. I'm just pointing out that you bringing it up (hmmm - without backing it up!) doesn't make it a valid point.

You seem to have a bone to pick. I said owned storage is cheaper, and you made up something about it not being redundant. You're not making a salient point as much as you're trying to handwave and dismiss owned hardware as complex, expensive, not worth the "value" one might get from S3, whatever.

If you REALLY think that storage can't be cheaper than "cloud" unless it's not redundant, then show us numbers. Otherwise, you're just making shit up.

You mention all your other things as if you're saying, "Gotcha!" You still have to monitor Amazon. You still have to manage backups. You still have to monitor resource utilization. You're not being clever by trying to imagine that other admins are as bad as you are because all those things seem hard. Good admins do those things no matter where their stuff is running.