Re:It's tough being an Azure fan
by KronisLV on Friday September 24, 2021 @02:23AM
(#28639196)
You hear about all of these horror stories about services from IaaS/PaaS/SaaS providers essentially being black holes for money with no way to actually set hard limits for billing, even after all of these years and can't help but to think about more reasonable alternatives.
Providers that just give you VPSes that you can run whatever containers on (or just host things the old fashioned way) and basically use whatever open source software that your project needs. More importantly, providers that give you predictable billing at a flat figure per month (or less, if your VPS isn't active all of the month) and simply slow down your network connection if the set limits are exceeded.
If you're just doing something to practice and haven't sold out to SaaSS (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...), you probably really don't need to worry about scaling just yet - you can migrate over to AWS, GCP, Azure, or any other of the large providers at any time, by just running your containers on their scalable infrastructure, if there's even any point in doing that, since the smaller providers also can scale similarly in most cases.
Lastly, it just feels dangerous to give AWS, GCP, Azure or any other entity that's known to give people insane bills your personal details and personal credit/debit card details - what if they decide to block you because you can't pay and your complaint doesn't become popular on Reddit or HackerNews? It almost feels like setting up a shell company and using limited virtual credit cards would be more reasonable, same as people always say that you should have a separate Google account for your personal needs and anything in any professional capacity, so nothing gets blanket banned.
Sadly, there aren't many tutorials that start with: "Here's how you set up a company that's detached from your personal details, and here's how to easily make one credit card per vendor." Honestly, even the internal workings of companies like https://privacy.com/ are unclear to me.
Re:It's tough being an Azure fan
by isatty on Friday September 24, 2021 @03:10AM
(#28639452)
For running personal projects that don’t need to scale instantly to demand you are 100% right that you should not go with cloud providers. Hell, most startups shouldn’t either.
Why not just use something like DigitalOcean (https://www.digitalocean.com/products/droplets/), Vultr (https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/), Hetzner (https://www.hetzner.com/cloud), Contabo (https://contabo.com/en/) or even smaller regional ones: personally i use Time4VPS in Lithuania because it's close to me (https://www.time4vps.com/?affid=5294, affiliate link to make my hosting cheaper if someone else registers)?
Providers that just give you VPSes that you can run whatever containers on (or just host things the old fashioned way) and basically use whatever open source software that your project needs. More importantly, providers that give you predictable billing at a flat figure per month (or less, if your VPS isn't active all of the month) and simply slow down your network connection if the set limits are exceeded.
If you're just doing something to practice and haven't sold out to SaaSS (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...), you probably really don't need to worry about scaling just yet - you can migrate over to AWS, GCP, Azure, or any other of the large providers at any time, by just running your containers on their scalable infrastructure, if there's even any point in doing that, since the smaller providers also can scale similarly in most cases.
Lastly, it just feels dangerous to give AWS, GCP, Azure or any other entity that's known to give people insane bills your personal details and personal credit/debit card details - what if they decide to block you because you can't pay and your complaint doesn't become popular on Reddit or HackerNews? It almost feels like setting up a shell company and using limited virtual credit cards would be more reasonable, same as people always say that you should have a separate Google account for your personal needs and anything in any professional capacity, so nothing gets blanket banned.
Sadly, there aren't many tutorials that start with: "Here's how you set up a company that's detached from your personal details, and here's how to easily make one credit card per vendor." Honestly, even the internal workings of companies like https://privacy.com/ are unclear to me.