[wobfan]

To be fair, I think people are vastly over estimating the work they would have and the power they would need. Yes, if you have to massively scale up, then it'll take some work, but most of it is one-time work. You do it, and when it runs, you only have a fraction of work over the next months to maintain it. And with fraction, I mean below 5%. And keep in mind that >99% of startups who think of "yeah we need this and that cloud, because we need to scale" will never scale. Instead they are happily locking themselves into a cloud service. And if they actually scale at some point, this service will be massively more expensive.

[coffeebeqn]

One decent server would be enough to run 99.5% of startups backends.

[maccard]

We have two on site servers that we use. For various reasons (power cuts, internet outages, cleaners unplugging them) I’d say we have to intervene with them physically about once a month. It’s a total pain in the ass, especially when you don’t have _an_ it person sitting in the office to mind it. I’m in the Uk and our office is in Spain…

But it is significantly cheaper and faster

[meatmanek]

You might want to look into colocating that server at a datacenter nearby. You can get a few U of rack space and the risk of power outages, internet outages, or cleaners unplugging the servers should go way down.

[maccard]

At that point it’s not worth it any more and we would just switch to hetzner or something instead.

[direwolf20]

Startups don't know how much hardware they need when they release to customers. The extreme flexibility of cloud makes a lot of sense for them.

[aforwardslash]

But they should; cloud wont magically make the architecture scale. A competent CTO should know the limits of the platform, its called "load testing" or "stress testing"; scalability is independent of the provider. Cloud gives you a nicer interface to add resources, granted; but that"s it.

As a hear-say anecdote, thats why some startups have db servers with hundreds of gb of ram and dozens of cpus to run a workload that could be served from a 5 year old laptop.