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by AndyNemmity 4115 days ago
Often times companies move because their organization doesn't deliver, and the hope is a cloud company will do a better job of it.

If you have a great team, I firmly believe hosting yourself is far, far, far less expensive.

If you have a terrible team, then cloud (hosting) is less expensive. Even if it was exactly the same cost, you're gaining by not having to have a staff to run it, and the costs of managing them, etc etc.

Most places don't have great teams. Insert random corporation here likely has a team that is a mess for whatever reasons happen in large companies.

In that case, the Cloud makes a ton of sense for them. They've already screwed up their own organization in some way, and this is a large reset button on the whole thing.

That's worth a ton in itself.

2 comments

If you're a small org with relatively small volume self-hosting doesn't make sense.
Can you elaborate why not ?

You can get some cheap dedicated hosting (ex: [1]) for a fraction of the price.

It's so cheap compared to AWS you can order a few spare ones and still come out cheaper than your one beefy AWS instance ?

The only way it doesn't make sense is, if you need to scale up and down very fast ?

[1] 60 euro/month: Quad-Core Haswell, 32 GB (non-ECC) RAM, 240Gb SSD @ https://www.hetzner.de

The cost of the systems is almost irrelevant. The time of qualified people is far more expensive. Sot it's not just the elasticity. You have to look everything from the time perspective as well. What additional knowledge will I need? Will I need to learn load balancers, how to make them highly available? will I have to learn about SSL certificates and termination? Will I need to learn how to implement and operate a secure and highly available DNS service? How much is your time worth? Our hosting costs are a fraction of a single worker's salary. Whether AWS is more expensive is essentially irrelevant. OP argues that it was not doing the job for them which is an entirely different issue.
Don't forget the quality of the work. Frankly, if I'm administering servers I'm not going to do as good a job of it as someone whose whole job is that and I'm not going to do as good a job as Azure or AWS or whoever else either. Platform as a service is the way to go.
Hetzner is fantastic but if you're not in Europe, what's your latency like?
There's OVH that has a big data center in Montreal.
Because if your sysadmins are all moonlighting developers having them not develop stuff to do subpar system work is more expensive than just paying the cloud premium.
Reset button is worth a ton in itself. This is a really nice way of looking at it.