> I figured the larger server would be a costsavings over many smaller ones.
Nope, you pay more for a single large machine than multiple small ones.
If your service is truly so stable that you only need to spend 10 hours a year maintaining it (and demand isn't growing), then maybe the cloud isn't right for you. But that's not true for most companies.
Actually pricing at both aws and gcp is linear.
Re:Why we are not leaving the cloud
by novembermike on Thursday March 02, 2017 @03:42PM
(#13778001)
For a single host that you know you'll want in 3 years it probably isn't worth it. If demand grows 10x in the next year though, how does that look? What if the host has a sudden failure? What if the business dies and you want to get rid of the host?
Most of it does need to remain online at all times including several large databases. Just running my logstash server alone eats 8 GB of RAM and 200+ GB of disk.
In bandwidth and storage alone I'm past the cost of the server - so even if I could split this up and keep it mostly offline it still wouldn't be close to worth it unless I'm missing something more significant?
> You're not including the time costs of operating that server.
Do you mean swapping the drives about once every 3 years with free DC remote hands? Operational costs there are almost nothing - maybe 10 hours a year of my time. Surely much less than it would take to get everything running on a cloud architecture. And that cloud architecture would still require some level of maintenance and monitoring I'm sure.