Not including the faster SSD & included traffic
If you're using AWS/GCP/Azure to just host a couple of VMs for a small group you're massively overpaying.
But if all you really do with cloud stuff is "ssh into a server I have" (which covers a ton!) then you'll find much cheaper/more performant elsewhere.
Personally, the only thing I know of that is a true deal vs. competition is cold storage of data. Using the s3 glacier tiers for long term data that is saved solely for emergencies is really cheap, something like $1/100GB a month or less.
AWS is usually not the cheapest EVER when it comes to offerings like EC2. If you aren't doing cloud-native or serverless at AWS, you're probably spending too much.
I view a large percentage of "cloud" usage like Teslas stock price: it's completely detached from reality by people who have drunk the kool aid and can't get out.
If I need to host something small, I don’t want to mess around with the many permissions and quirks that are required to deal with AWS. It is often much easier to just setup the server on a standalone service.
Having not used AWS for years, I logged in to check it out, navigated through the Kafkaesque maze of their services until I found what I was looking for:
A lone S3 storage bucket, with one file, "Squirrel.jpg". A 200kB picture of a squirrel that I uploaded 8 years ago and can't remember why.
I wonder what the cost to AWS was for keeping track of that and running your CC. There's no way they made money off you / that 12 cents/year cost them *at least* 12 cents to collect every year
One of the hard rules we learned pre-pandemic was that services attached to usage based billing should really exit on error. It's a lesson I'm keeping in mind working with agents and routing (and the main reason I'm local-first).
I replaced with a home server and it costs way more just in power hahaha.
Never had problems with downtime and I payed, like, 40 bucks a year over 3 years. I think I had to restart the thing once because of something dumb I did on my end.
VPS services are usually really, really simple and fairly cheap.
I'd say that actually VPS prices is where we actually see computing prices going down rather than on the big 3.
AWS used to optimize further and pass down the savings to the customers back in the day, now they don't do it anymore.
AWS does offer Lightsail which is similar pricing.
Outbound data pricing is a potentially huge saving.
AWS is as much as $90/TB outbound with 1GB free. Hetzner is $1.20/TB (in EU and US) with 1TB/20TB (US/EU) free.
(Good) Smaller places are more likely to have actual technical staff you can talk to.
That is a nice way to have a static IP on the internet and enough resources to do small things like host a nameserver and/or OpenVPN/Wireguard.
I may have had 4 hours of downtime in one year, always announced days in advance.
Does it have a billion 9's of reliability? No, but I don't care, it has literally never not worked when I've used it
Customer Service so far has been human, but that will vary greatly for the provider
I also use a different provider for work related hosting, and the reduced latency of being within 20 ms of the DC has been probably the single biggest (perceived) perf improvement my users have ever seen, specially on the legacy webforms platform we recently decomissioned (We're a bit too geographically far for most Datacenters of most large providers)
I use them to run wireguard to evade geoblocks when I'm travelling, a few redundant monitoring scripts alerting me of reachability issues of more critical stuff I care about, they serve as contingency access channels to my home (and home assistant) if my primary channels are down.
I get no support, no updates, it's all on me - which is fine, it allows me to stay current and not lose hands-on practice on skills which I anyway need for my job (and which are anyway my passion). I don't even get an entire IPv4 - I get.... 1/3000th of it? (21 ports, the rest are forwarded to other customers). Suits me fine.
If you’re a government agency or a company you don’t care about saving $14/month, you want a secure provider. And these hosts are not secure, you’re basically just on your own.
But, hypothetically if they had a ton of previous gen GPUs (so, less efficient) and a ton of intermittent energy (from solar or wind) maybe it could be a good tradeoff to run them intermittently?
Ultimately a workload that can profitably consumer “free” watts (and therefore flops) from renewable overprovisioning would be good for society I guess.
Except for RAM from YMTC, which the USA gave a near-death sentence to by placing it on the Dept. of Commerce “Entity List” so no USA-associated business can do business with YMTC now.
Can't get a Linux box to idle (or even install) under 512M these days.
Can't find a web developer worth a shit who doesn't think he needs a Python backend application server to print "Hello, world" when you could do this with a static page served with something like OpenBSD with two-digit RAM requirements.
It's not the RAM that's changed; it's everyone around the RAM.
A coddled generation who were taught that AWS is the Internet and live in abstractions certainly hasn't helped.
why
Windows NT was routinely run with 32 MB of RAM TOTAL and the event log is basically unchanged 30 years later.
Edit: Haha, withing a handful of seconds I got a downvote. :-D
Install can be tricky indeed, but if you have installed system, it's easier.
It's 12 dedicated cores of a modern EPYC CPU, 32GB RAM, 1TB NVMe.
I got that offer during their Black Friday sale and pay €25/month (price before VAT), plus the offer I got has a 2TB NVMe instead of the 1TB one.
CPU launch price 11000 USD. RAM will likely be another 10000 USD
20000 / 8 customers / 40 USD/mo = 62 months just to recoup CPU and RAM let alone other components.
Weird, whenever I napkin math offers of any HW for renting, I get that I could buy it myself in 1-2 years of rent. Sometimes faster.
Update: Fourplex (this host) uses a 1GB minimum.
What I found is that it is cheap because the cores, and presumably ram, is old. Like, 2013 era Xeon E3-1275 v3 old. But that's fine! Old hardware like this uses old ram that is less affected by the current shortage. It's good enough for my needs.
How can you trust Gary from GaryHosting not to just steal all your data? How can you trust him to have redundant networks? You just can’t.
miyuru•1h ago
IPv4 shortages didn’t kill it, and I don’t think this will either.
1970-01-01•21m ago