Re:Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud
by Nextgrid on Friday March 10, 2023 @08:56PM
(#35104288)
Hosting providers such as Hetzner or OVH take care of all of that for you and include it into a fixed, monthly price per server.
I however would like to address some of your points which I find absolutely ridiculous:
> Staff salaries for administrators that maintain an on-premise data center
Every cloud-native company I've been at had an entire team wrangling YAML files around. I'm not exactly sure why they had to do so (because everything was stable and as you say, the cloud is supposed to handle all maintenance/etc for you) but they did and cost a pretty penny.
The only case where I genuinely agree that the "cloud" saves money on administration is fully-managed PaaS providers.
> The cost of keeping the servers powered 24/7
A non-cloud-based, peak-capacity-sized deployment costs less to run than a cloud-based deployment scaled at minimum capacity. Servers are super fucking cheap nowadays. Hetzner will happily sell you a 16-core, 128GB of RAM, 4TB redundant NVME SSD machine with 20TB of included external bandwidth for ~150 bucks a month. AWS will cost more than that on bandwidth alone.
I however would like to address some of your points which I find absolutely ridiculous:
> Staff salaries for administrators that maintain an on-premise data center
Every cloud-native company I've been at had an entire team wrangling YAML files around. I'm not exactly sure why they had to do so (because everything was stable and as you say, the cloud is supposed to handle all maintenance/etc for you) but they did and cost a pretty penny.
The only case where I genuinely agree that the "cloud" saves money on administration is fully-managed PaaS providers.
> The cost of keeping the servers powered 24/7
A non-cloud-based, peak-capacity-sized deployment costs less to run than a cloud-based deployment scaled at minimum capacity. Servers are super fucking cheap nowadays. Hetzner will happily sell you a 16-core, 128GB of RAM, 4TB redundant NVME SSD machine with 20TB of included external bandwidth for ~150 bucks a month. AWS will cost more than that on bandwidth alone.