Ask HN: Cloud providers are losing in favor of bare-metal?

3•clostao•2h ago

Lately, I’ve noticed a new trend on X: Devs (and indie hackers in particular) are ditching cloud providers and jumping straight to bare-metal servers like Hetzner.

Honestly, I think the big cloud companies just haven’t kept up. Their services feel clunky compared to the standalone alternatives. Just try comparing Vercel’s dev experience to Amplify’s, and you’ll see what I mean. On top of that, AWS has gotten way stingier with startup credits.

Put those two together, and it’s no surprise fewer people are hosting their MVPs on AWS. It’s tough to stay under $150/month with a database and a server, while on bare metal you can grab 16 GB RAM for around $20/month.

- Do you think the cloud is actually losing ground? - And for those using bare-metal: how do you handle DB backups, CI/CD, and pulling logs? - Would you scale something using bare-metal servers?

[Carlos](https://github.com/clostao)

Comments

curious_curios•1h ago

Given that AWS, Azure and GCP are all recording 20-40% YoY growth, no, I don’t think they’re losing ground.

As for startup credits, they’re still handing out $100-200k like candy if they deem you a serious startup. There was a lot of abuse in the past so they started putting up filters.

kasey_junk•1h ago

Interesting that you call hetzner “bare metal”. Most of their product offerings are cloud based VMs (and certainly for $20 a month you are getting shared hardware VMs). Do you think more devs are are actually buying hardware/servers or do you just mean devs are using VMs provided by smaller companies instead of the hyper scalers, when you say “bare metal”.

clostao•16m ago

True, more than bare-metal I meant dedicated servers on-premise

kasey_junk•13m ago

Again that’s a confusing line. Hetzner does not provide (as its main business) “on premise” options as id use that term.

When you get dedicated servers from them, typically it’s VMs on their machines, in their data centers and the hyper scalers have options just like that.

speedgoose•1h ago

I don’t think so. Hetzner sees some growth but they are still very small.

DB can have replicas and upload dumps to some S3 compatible object stores. Like in the cloud. CI/CD with stuff like gitlab and Argo CD is mostly the same. You can install some log monitoring stuff like the classic Elk stack. Or be old fashioned and use ssh and journalctl.

I wouldn’t attempt to automatically scale to the moon on bare metal, that won’t happen. But a few beefy servers running k3s or similar can get you pretty far.

dabinat•22m ago

I would say it depends on the effort to cost savings ratio. I moved my most expensive servers there because that’s where it made the most sense. If it totals considerable amounts of money it is absolutely worth the extra effort, but it is not worth it if you only have a handful of t4g.mediums.

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