this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
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I’d like to thank the admins for being so open and direct about the issues that they’re facing.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Oh goodness, why is this so funny? lol.

blobhaj, ani, hearts, animated

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 162 points 1 year ago (12 children)

I don't get why anyone hosts Servers running 24/7 on AWS/GCloud/Azure. The pricing is just outrageous. Everyone else will be cheaper

[–] [email protected] 88 points 1 year ago (1 children)

To be fair, with a proper autoscaling scheme in place these services should scale down significantly when not in use.

That being said, a big reason for using AWS/GCP is all the additional services that are available on the platform.. If the workload being run isn't that complicated, the hyperscalers are probably overkill. Even DO or Linode would be a better option under those circumstances.

[–] [email protected] 64 points 1 year ago (4 children)

This. AWS architect here. There are a lot of ways to reduce pricing in AWS like horizontal scaling, serverless functions, reserved instances. Most people aren't aware of it and if you're going to dive in head first into something like cloud, you'll need to bear the consequences and then learn eventually.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Even with ASGs, ec2 costs a bomb for performance.

And "serverless" functions are a trap.

If you're gonna commit to reserved instances, just buy hardware for goodness sake, its a 3 year commitment with a huge upfront spend.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You can do one year dedicated spend.

But yes. Serverless is a trap to be avoided.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Mark my words the loop is coming back around. I look forward to when my work migrates the datacenter off AWS back on prem because of ballooning costs.

You work in IT long enough you see it for the joke it is. We get paid obscene amounts of money to do what amounts to nothing.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Just because rotating managers always come with the 'new current thing everyone is doing'.

Like no, 99% of companies can just do what they've always done. No need to rebuild everything from scratch.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

And “serverless” functions are a trap.

How are serverless functions a trap? They seem like a great cheap option for simple CRUD / client > server > db apps (what most apps end up being).

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Yep. And if you want to really save some cash and don't mind getting a little crazy, use an EKS node orchestrator that supports spot instances. I'm starting to do a serious dive into Harness at the moment actually.

Google recently released a white paper on cost saving in kubernetes as well.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm in a similar boat. I'm a sysadmin supporting a legacy application running on AWS EC2 instances and a new 'serverless' microservice based platform as well. It's really really hard to scale and optimize anything running on EC2s unless you really know what you're doing or the application is designed with clustering in mind.

You tend to end up sizing instances based on peak load and then wasting capacity 90% of the time (and burning through cash like crazy). I can imagine a lot of Lemmy admins are overspending so fast they give up before they figure it out.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Nowadays I feel like EC2 is either used for legacy support or testing. Most prod nowadays should probably be built with some kind of container solution so you can scale it easier.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago

AWS is perfect for large operations that value stability and elasticity over anything else.

It's very easy to just spin up a thousand extra servers for momentary demand or some new exciting project. It's also easy to locate multiple instances all over the world for low latency with your users.

If you know you're going to need a couple servers for years and have the hardware knowhow, then it's cheaper to do it yourself for sure.

It's also possible to use aws more efficiently if you know all of their services. I ran a small utils website for my friends and I on it a while ago and it was essentially free since the static files were tiny and on s3 and the backend was lambda which gives you quite a few free calls before charging.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Habit (guess). Its what is used professionally, despite being proven over and over that cost-per-speed is terrible compared to less known providers.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

If the average Web engineer's salary capable of running a site like this is ~$180,000, then a $30,000 difference in cost is only about 2 months salary. Learning and dealing with a new hosting environment can easily exceed that.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That, and like others mentioned their flexibility, plus the fact that they're fairly reliable (maybe less than some good Iaas providers but a fair bit more than your consumer vps places). Moments ago I went to the hetzner site to check them out and got:

Status Code 504 Gateway Timeout

The upstream server failed to send a request in the time allowed by the server. If you are the Administrator of the Upstream, check your server logs for errors.

Annoying if it's you nextloud instance down for a minutes, but a worthy trade off if you're paying 1/4 of the price. Extremely costly for big business or even risking peoples's lives for a few different very important systems.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Hetzner is one of the most cost effective but I recommend always checking serverhunter before choosing

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

AWS is mostly only useful for large companies who need one hosting provider for all their needs, with every single product tightly integrated into other products

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hmm like SAP, but less sucky

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It does, but that comes with the territory. SAP is the IBM mainframe of business software. You'll be hard-pressed to find a large multinational which don't run SAP... or have a couple of IBM mainframes to run it on. The kind of "large" which means that they don't have IT departments but IT subsidiaries, probably created by buying up a couple of tech consultancies. You know like Samsung buying Joyent, saying "never mind your public platform you'll be busy enough hosting all our data we're the only customer you'll ever need".

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The only advantage would come if you could rewrite lemmy to be serverless

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

The pricing scheme here is designed to gouge businesses for equal or more than the traditional non-cloud equivalent. Which happens to be completely unaffordable. Imagine buying a new enterprise grade server for your home setup.

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[–] [email protected] 70 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Figure 1: Human discovers that hosting a web service for hundreds of thousands of users is expensive.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Feddit runs on a 10€/Month VPS. And its one of the biggest nodes in the network

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago

Hetzner crowd says hi!

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I host mine on my home wifi

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I thought that was a rat colony

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Why don't you migrate to cheaper providers like Hetzner? I mean AWS is extremely expensive for what they are and I am pretty sure there are hundreds of people out here who will willingly help you set it up.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Oracle free tier, 4arm cores, 200gb storage, 24gb ram, zero money's spent

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Oracle is all fun and games until they lose your instance’s IP or data and don’t give it back because you’re a free tier freeloader.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

That sounds like the bitter expression of regret and experience.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

thats why you make backups and update the dns records 😎

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I do enough of this in the day job. I don’t have time to mess around with free hosting to save $20 a month.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago
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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No catch? Especially with Oracle? Hard to believe kinda, nothing is ever "free".

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

Rome wasn’t built in a day

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

linode whenthe

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