Yeah we literally turned our $7k a month AWS bill into $1k a month by changing to 3 dedicated servers (Fully managed!) and cloudflare. It's better in every conceivable way.

For anyone doing this... look around.

Tooling has only improved.

We were able to cram a large set of applications into a group of instances using CapRover.

Instead of 2-3 instances, and a whole bunch of RDS, we ended just recreating the databases there along with minio for storage (we write a small amount of data to S3 storage).

what instance types were you using? do the dedis have the same specs as the ec2 instances? what about contracts (do you have one on the dedis?) are you only using servers or other aws services?

Colocation is another in-between. Build your own server, but the racks / datacenter / power delivery / real estate / network is all rented from another group.

Colocation is probably ideal for anyone using custom hardware: like GPUs or FPGAs. If you're using "normal" CPUs, just buy dedicated instances instead.

Ya, I feel like this must be coming from the younger crowd who is just used to seeing all the cloud marketing comparing cloud computer to building your own data center.

Anyone who has been in the industry since pre-cloud explosion knows that most people just rented bare metal and at the more complicated end they might purchase their own hardware and colocate.

And for those that own their servers, many lease them and HP or Dell or whoever maintains them on site if anything goes wrong.

Yes, this also seems weird to me. And I think it might be a cultural thing, I noticed that in Europe renting dedicated servers is far more popular than in the US.

Maybe it’s because wages are a lot lower in Europe? Better to outsource to the cloud than hire more people if people are expensive.

IDK where you get the 'wages are a lot lower in Europe' thing. There are lower cost and higher cost places, but people are expensive and talent is mobile.

I don’t know, in the Bay Area 150k is entry level and big companies pay 250k or much higher to senior engineers. Whenever I hear about pay in Europe it’s a fraction of that. It may be worth it for a different lifestyle, I’m not making that argument. Regardless, from the company POV it must lead to different choices about buy vs. build.

This is why you see a lot of insurance companies, for instance, with their tech folks quartered in Ohio. Easily half the cost for 90% of the talent.

I'm surprised that more companies aren't playing moneyball with nice, but cheap, locations.

Bay area or NYC sure, that's like being in London, but what about the Midwest, or any of the places where you can easily set up an IT shop without paying a premium for space?

My impression is that programmer and IT salaries are SF>>NYC>>London, even if living costs aren’t similarly different.

how will you attract the talent?

- Get your own bedroom. - 30 minute commute. - Not everyone you meet will be in tech. - You'll be rich compared to everyone else in town. - Partner with local academic institutions to offer recognized research projects and training. 20% time or 3 month project stints etc. Adjunct professor ships for people with an existing research record. - Throw in X free flights to east/west coast, home town etc.

there’s 30 minute commutes in san diego, la and sf if you live in the right areas. what about weather? cali has really nice weather. schools / doctoral candidates / etc are basically useless in the real world. if i’m making enough money the free flights are useless. nothing you said here makes me want to move to the middle of the US. exactly what i’m looking at is the lack of opportunity. say i decide to move for some job and hate it. now what? pick up the family and move again?

The Bay Area is a tiny fraction of the U.S.

Believe it or not most U.S. programmers don't live in the Bay Area.

They 100% are. They're not even close.

More likely about trust/security/privacy issues.

The popularity of MBA is nearly zero in the EU

Renting bare metal is exactly how the business worked prior to the rise of EC2. e.g Rackspace, Linode.

You can rent vs buy at any level : rent only machines, rent a 1/2 a rack, rent a full rack, rent a cage, rent 1/2 a dc, and so on.

Same with connectivity: you can plug your machines into a lan managed by the hosting provider, or run your own routers and peer with their in-house ISP, or you can buy peering directly in the building, or you can rent lightpath from a telco with pop in the building, or you can go rent a backhoe and start trenching across the parking lot...

If you rent the backhoe... make sure you call before you dig and don't cut one of my fibers, please.

Well spotted.