Re:Lessons Learned from 11 Years of Hosting a SaaS
by cjalmeida on Thursday June 15, 2023 @01:43PM
(#36344062)
This is the way. Unless you are huge, self hosting and even colo is not competitive with long term VM commitments in hyper scalers.
They get big discounts on everything you'd pay retail, and their margins for barebones VM is not that large.
Re:Lessons Learned from 11 Years of Hosting a SaaS
by aetherspawn on Thursday June 15, 2023 @06:48PM
(#36347834)
One of our 100 core boxes is Windows Server and it looks like they want $79,949 annually for it.
Re:Lessons Learned from 11 Years of Hosting a SaaS
by aetherspawn on Thursday June 15, 2023 @09:42PM
(#36349842)
I wanted to add more info but couldn't edit. We bought that server for $12,000 with 5 year warranty, and got our Windows Server licenses out of an MS bundle which cost about $400.
I think that brings the ROI after 5 years compared with AWS to something like 3200%, less energy, if nothing goes wrong.
(I know that there are better options than running Windows Server on this box, but it seems to perform the same, it's far easier to administer by inexperienced devops, and in the long term it's actually around $1500/yr cheaper than running supported RHEL. Our other box is running supported RHEL but after testing Windows Server and having no issues we'll probably switch it for the cost savings).
This is a great point. Hyper focus on optimizing micro-containers is costly and sucks up a lot of time. You can still deploy like this in the cloud though. On AWS make a three-year reservation of a c6a.32xlarge to get 128 vCPU for $16k annually. Hetzner is cheaper, 80 vCPU for about €2,506 annually.
[1] https://instances.vantage.sh/aws/ec2/c6a.32xlarge
[2] https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/rx170