The main thrust of the economic argument has been on the cost of system adminstrators that maintain the hardware. Electricity and cooling being big ongoing costs, but also when AWS released it wasn't uncommon to order a server and have it take 3 months to arrive.

I think in practice the system administrators are still in the company now as AWS engineers, they still keep all that platform stuff running and your paying AWS for their engineers too as well as electricity. It has the advantage of being very quick to spin up another box, but also machines these days can come with 288 cores, its not a big stretch to maintain sufficient surplass and the tools to allow teams to self service.

Things are in a different place to when AWS first released, AWS ought to be charging a lot less for the compute, memory and storage, their business is wildly profitable at current rates because per core machines got cheaper.

I've moved two clients to colo. Dramatic cost savings. So many systems only use VMs and a few basic cloud features. Everyone knows this, but just to make the point, you can still use certain cloud products (cloud storage for example) just fine while running your primary workloads on your own hardware. Sometimes it makes perfect sense, and you just need someone to nudge you and tell you it's going to be ok.

ou're spot on—the performance-per-dollar variance across instance families right now is wild, and static provisioning almost always leaves money on the table. The real challenge is that workload profiles shift faster than teams can manually re-evaluate these benchmarks. We actually built CloudThinker to automate exactly this: continuously mapping real-time resource usage to the most cost-efficient compute across multi-cloud environments. It's much easier when an AI agent handles the rightsizing migrations autonomously.

Going to the cloud can't possibly be as cheap as owning your own hardware for obvious reasons - they have to make money somehow. Well, unless you use spot instances, which uses spare nodes. In any case, you move to the cloud despite the cost if you need the multi-region redundancy, the management/features etc. More commonly it's because the higher ups heard everybody's doing it, but oh well :D

There are so many articles like these:

"We Moved from AWS to Hetzner. Cut Costs 89%. Here’s the Catch."

https://medium.com/lets-code-future/we-moved-from-aws-to-het...

You just linked AI slop.

You mean the image? The text does not sound like AI at all IMHO.

> No theory. No fluff. Just production.

ChatGPT tells me "no theory, no fluff" all the time :D

Where do you think it learned that phrasing from?

Not from people using that same phrasing twice within a few sentences.

""" No warning. No traffic spike. Just… more money gone.

That’s when I finally looked at Hetzner.

I’ve seen too many backend systems fail for the same reasons — and too many teams learn the hard way.

So I turned those incidents into a practical field manual: real failures, root causes, fixes, and prevention systems.

No theory. No fluff. Just production. """

It's clearly slop, they immediately use effectively the same one again:

""" That last line isn’t a joke. There were charges I genuinely couldn’t explain. Elastic IPs we forgot to release. Snapshots from instances that no longer existed. CloudFront distributions someone set up for testing. """

No, human writers don't repeat this pattern every single paragraph. They use it at most across in a whole article.

Repetition is a very common tool in writing (ie 'I have a dream').

I'm just irked that it's being called out for AI slop because "I feel it in my bones!!"

There's a good chance it was written using AI -- should that matter? If the content is wrong/sucks, say that instead. If you're going to dismiss all AI assisted writing: good luck in the next decade.

Reading the same (very annoying marketing blog) style of writing gets old fast.

It’s like suddenly all memes are just the same meme and nobody makes their own memes because “AI does it better”.

The style of writing is an intrinsic part of communication, if you can’t critique that then what is content? We’re not machines sharing pieces of data with each other.

AI-written text is not necessarily incorrect, but if the author did not take their time to remove the AI slop, they probably did not put much effort into it elsewhere. In addition, the text is often over two times longer than without the slop, which disrespects the reader's time (even worse in this case, since a significant fraction of the article is an ad for the author's books).

> I just don’t understand it

Maintaining and updating your own hardware comes with so much operational overhead compared to magically spinning up and down resources as needed. I don’t think this really needs to be said.

I dunno… for setup, yes absolutely. One time cost in time. After that, not really.

It’s absolutely not a one time cost. Once you have it you need to hire people full time to maintain it and eventually upgrade it. Hardware fails constantly

I've done this for decades with a full rack. Stuff fails on occasion. So what?

You need to factor in the data center, power, cooling, hands-on support, future growth, etc.

You're never just paying for the hardware.

I think lower cost of capital is a narrow metric and rarely reflects the real total cost of ownership once you account for ops headcount, provisioning lag, redundancy requirements, patching, and developer time.

Cloud looks expensive on sticker price, but it buys instant provisioning, autoscaling, managed databases and multi-region DR, and those benefits only pay off if you actually exploit autoscaling, reserved or savings plans, spot fleets and cost tooling like Kubecost or AWS Compute Optimizer to enforce right-sizing and kill zombie instances.

If you want cheap dev and UAT keep them on on-prem metal or cheap colo, but automate with Terraform and run reproducible runtimes like k3s or devcontainers so environments stay consistent and you do not trade lower capex for a creeping operations nightmare.

I think it can make sense for user-facing services. I host my web and database servers with AWS because unmanaged DBs can be a PITA, Amazon is peered with basically everyone, AWS is way more generous with network speeds than many dedicated / colo providers, and it’s easy to scale capacity up and down. Backend servers are hosted with cheaper providers though.

Everything I've read says that self-hosting doesn't become cheaper than AWS for companies until you reach $1-$3 million per month spending when all costs are accounted for. Then there is the highly overlooked aspect that a good API like AWS has lets your expensive admins actually get things done hundreds of times faster than how most self-hosted IT can do. It usually takes months to buy and install additional capacity for most companies.

> good API like AWS has lets your expensive admins actually get things done hundreds of times faster than how most self-hosted IT can do

Depends. APIs must take into account many more cases than our own specific use case, and I find we are often spending a lot of time going through unnecessary (for us) hoops. And that's leaving aside possible API changes.

I'm having a hard time imagining a situation where an using an API is slower than not.

I think it's incentives. Working with AWS is good for your resume. It's also a responsibility thing. If AWS is down then it's Amazon's fault. If there's a problem with your physical server, then it's your problem.

A broader thing here is -- and you may also notice this trend in software -- employees are incentivized towards complex solutions, while business owners are incentivized towards simple solutions.

(Shiny object syndrome sold separately ;)