[Imustaskforhelp]

Wait what? can you show me some sources to back this up? I assume you are exaggerating but still, what would be the definition of cheap is interesting to know.

I don't think after the fact that ram prices spiked 4-5x that its gonna be cheaper to self host by 100x, Like hetzner's or ovh's cloud offerings are cheap

Plus you have to put a lot of money and then still pay for something like colocation if you are competing with them

Even if you aren't, I think that the models are different. They are models of monthly subscription whereas in hardware, you have to purchase it.

It would be interesting tho to compare hardware-as-a-service or similar as well but I don't know if I see them for individual stuff.

[andruby]

100x is probably hyperbole. 37 signals saved between 50 and 66% in hosting costs when moving from cloud to self hosted.

https://basecamp.com/cloud-exit

[victorbjorklund]

But they have scale. A small company will save less because it’s not that much more work to handle say a 100 node kubernetes cluster vs a 10 node kubernetes cluster.

[shimman]

Self hosting nowadays is way way way way easier than you're thinking. I'm involved working with various political campaigns and the first thing I help every team do is provision a 10 year old laptop, flash linux, and setup a DDNS. A $100 investment is more than enough for a campaign of 10-20ish dedicated workers that will only be hitting this system one/two users at a time. If I can teach a random 70 year old retiree or 16 year old on how to type a dozen different commands, I'm sure a paid professional can learn too.

People need to realize that when you selfhost you can choose to follow physical business constraints. If no one is in the office to turn on a computer, you're good. Also consumer hardware is so powerful (even 10 year old hardware) that can easily handle 100k monthly active users, which is barely 3k daily users, and I doubt most SMBs actually need to handle anything beyond 500 concurrent users hardware wise. So if that's the choice it comes down to writing better and more performant software, which is what is lacking nowadays.

People don't realize how good modern tooling + hardware has come. You can get by with very little if you want.

I'd bet my years salary that a good 40% of AWS customers could probably be fine with a single self hosted server using basic plug in play FOSS software on consumer hardware.

People in our industry have been selling massive lies on the need for scalability, the amount of companies that require such scalability are quite small in reality. You don't need a rocket ship to walk 2 blocks, and it often feels like this is the case in our industry.

If self hosting is "too scary" for your business, you can buy a $10 VPS but after one single year you can probably find decade old hardware that is faster than what you pay for.

[oldandboring]

I'm in your camp but I go for the cheap VPS. Lightsail and DigitalOcean are amazing -- for $10/mo or less you get a cheap little box that's essentially everything you describe, but with all the peace of mind that comes from not worrying about physical security, physical backups, dynamic IPs/DDNS, and running out of storage space. You're right that almost nobody needs most of the stuff that AWS/GCP/Azure can do, but some things in the cloud are worth paying for.

[Imustaskforhelp]

Yea absolutely this. This is what I was saying, so like having a vps for starting out definitely makes sense. Like, I think when it starts making sense to build your own cloud is around the 500-1000$ mark per month

I searched hetzner and honestly at just around the 500 mark (506.04) seeing it on their refurbished auction for sale, I can get around 1024 GB of ram AMD EPYC 7502 2 x 1.92 TB Datacenter SSD

In this ramflation imagine getting so much ram would cost a bank.

Like I love homelabbing too and I think that an old laptop sometimes can be enough for basic things to even more modern things but I did some calculations and colocrossing or the professional renting model or even buying new hardware model in this ramflation would probably not work.

It's sad but like, the only place it might make sense is if you can get yourself a good firewall and have an old laptop or server and will do something like this but even then I have heard it be described as not worth it by many but I think its an interesting experiment.

Also regarding the 1024 GB of ram's, holy.. I wonder how many programs need so much ram. I will still do homelabbing and things but like, y'know I am kinda hard pressed in how much we can recommend if ramflation is so much and that's when I saw someone originally writing saying 100x I really wondered how much is enough and at what scale or what others think

[victorbjorklund]

Yea, but admit that I am right that it is not that much harder to manage 100 nodes vs 10 nodes. (At least you can agree you don’t need 10x more staff to manage 100 nodes instead of 10)

That’s the key. If you need one person or 3 persons doesn’t matter. The point is the salaries are fixed costs.

[mystifyingpoi]

You are right, but it's a feature of Kubernetes actually. If you treat nodes as cattle, then it doesn't matter if there is 10 or 100 or 1000, as long as the apiserver can survive the load and upgrades don't take too long (though upgrades/maintenance can be done slowly for even days without any problems).

But all the stateful crap (like databases) gets trickier and harder the more machines you have.

[shimman]

Ah sorry, I completely misread. You are right, and to add another dimension even when you choose to go to the cloud you still have to hire nearly the same amount of personal to deal with those tools. I've never worked at a software company that didn't have devs specifically to deal with cloud issues and integrations.

[kachapopopow]

A small company benefits more than anyone since it's not rocket science to learn these things so you can just put on your system administrator hat once every few weeks, would not be ideal to lose that employee which is why I always suggest a couple of people picking up this very useful skill.

But I don't know much about how it is a real world and normal 9 to 5 I have taken up jobs from system administration to reverse engineering and to even making plugins and infrastructure for minecraft I generally only work these days when people don't have any other choice and need someone who is pretty good at everything so I am completely out of the loop.

[victorbjorklund]

It takes me almost equal time to manage a Kubernetes cluster with 10 nodes as with 100 nodes. If I have to spend say 5 hours per month and with a cost of say 100 usd/hour it means it cost 500 usd/month to manage. If leaving cloud saves say 100 usd/node from 200 usd/node it means for a small company its cost would be (10100)+500=1500 usd/month which is a cost reduction of 25%. For a large company it would be greater (100100)+500=10500 which means a 47.5% savings. Do you see why the savings are greater with scale?

[kachapopopow]

well bigger clusters have weird complexities and require specialized knowledge if you don't want your production to blow up every couple of months.

small clusters can be run with minimal knowledge which means the added cost is $0.

[Imustaskforhelp]

Considering the fact that ramflation happened, and we assume the cost of hardware to be spread between 5 years, someone please run the numbers again.

It would be interesting to see the scale of basecamp. I just saw right now that hetzner offers 1024 GB of ram for around 500$

Um 37signals spent around 700k$ I think on servers so if someone has this much amount of money floating around, perhaps.

Yea I looked at their numbers and they mentioned a 1300$/month for just hardware for 1.3 TB and so hetzner might still make economically more sense somehow.

I think the problem for some of these is that they go too hard on the managed services and those are good sometimes as well but like, there are cheaper managed cloud than aws etc. as well (upcloud,ovh etc.) but at the end of the day, it's good to remember that if it bothers you financially, you can migrate.

Honestly do whatever you want. Start however you want because like these things definitely interest me (which is why I am here) but I think most compute providers have really gone the path of the bottom.

The problem usually feels to me when you are worried that you might break the term of service or anything similar if you are at scale or anything, not that this stops exactly being a problem with colo but that still brings more freedom

I think if one wants freedom, they can always contact some compute providers and find what can support their use case the best while still being economical. And then choose the best option from the multitude of available options.

Also vertical scaling is a beast.

I really went into learning a lot about cloud prices recently etc. so I want to ask a question but can you tell me more about the servers that 37signals brought or any other company you know of, I can probably create a list when it makes sense and when it doesn't perhaps and the best options available in markets.

[andruby]

They went for Dell servers: https://world.hey.com/dhh/the-hardware-we-need-for-our-cloud...

Hardware with service contracts makes sense. You can probably get the hardware even cheaper is you build supermicro servers, but then you'll spend more time on hardware support.

Dell makes a ton of sense.