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by microgpt 1 hour ago
Yeah but you don't need cloud for a blog. Cloud was sold as effectively infinite resources - capacity isn't infinite, or effectively infinite, it's 20% more than you are currently using and you pay 300% more for that.

There has to be a name for this deceptive marketing tactic where you say something is unlimited and then it is only unlimited as long as you don't use very much.

It would be one thing if you occasionally got a "no more capacity" error when requesting large amounts of resources but it doesn't work that way. They confine you to a relatively small amount of resources the entire time you have an account. If you want more you have to request it.

2 comments

It was sold as flexible, near instant provisioning of DC level resources. I don't recall having seen infinite anywhere.
It's not flexible if it only flexes 20% above your current usage
A blog for your product, if your product is already on the cloud, is a very sensible use case for the cloud. Static one deployed to a bucket and a CDN, fast, cache on the edge, high availability.

The tiny blog sure isn't for the cloud, but also it's not the main client of the cloud.

> it's 20% more than you are currently using and you pay 300% more for that.

I'm assuming you are comparing to self hosting. Then you need to account for things that are difficult to put a price like your time maintaining a physical infrastructure and the lessons you will learn with it.

Sounds like I'm defending the big cloud, but there is a valid use that is disconsidered because it's trendy to hate on the cloud.

> They confine you to a relatively small amount of resources the entire time you have an account. If you want more you have to request it.

It's a form of KYC, nothing wrong with that.

I compare cloud to non-cloud VPSes. If you compare them to self-hosting the price is even more biased against cloud, even with current RAM prices. Did you know you can get 40G or 100G dedicated internet to your colo rack for something like $2000 a month (prices vary greatly, YMMV)? Colo only makes sense if you need a fairly large quantity of compute resources, but the per-unit cost can be very good. Every other style of hosting is building on top of it with a profit margin, after all.
if im going to have to ask for capacity, why dont I just get my own bare metal servers then?
Because you don't have to wait for weeks just for delivery. And you pay for elastic usage.
You can order bare metal servers delivery time in minutes from any number of hosting providers and the cost difference is so huge you can afford to keep excess capacity and still come out ahead.