That article is not just comparing apples to oranges; with that default aws setup, he is comparing apples to a herd of donkeys.<p>The correct comparison is his server vs a single EC2 High-Memory Double Extra Large instance with a 3 year heavy-utilization reservation. This instance costs $3100 upfront plus $0.14/hour. The total 3 year cost for this server on AWS would be 3100 + (.14 * 24 * 365 * 3) = 6779.2, or about $188.31 per month.<p>Sure, its more expensive. But AWS provides an insane of value on top of the server. Like instantly being able to provision additional capacity. I wouldn't be at all surprised if, on a full-loaded cost basis, it is extremely competitive with building his server. Heck, the employee salary expense of building your own server will easily drive the cost of the server well beyond the $3100 up front amazon fee.<p>I love building hardware too (never had a computer I didn't build except for laptops). But my mind boggles at AWS value proposition
I myself like to do this. But only for home servers. I would never do that for a "serious" application. There are several reasons, the most important one being that this is a perfect example where outsourcing the work is both cheaper (economies of scale), more reliable (parts are tested better) and less risky (companies which do that at a larger scale have better risk management). If one the SSDs dies he has to drive there and switch it out, instead of one person simply doing that for the whole data center. This is simply inefficient.<p>And of course Amazon hosting is more expensive. It is more flexible; you can spin up instances at your whim. You pay for that. It would be better to compare it with standard dedicated server hosting.
Where's he colocating those servers? Last time I dabbled with colocation, the bandwidth costs per-server were by far the dominant cost. I found it difficult to get anything at all for small quantities of servers.<p>Looking at he.net at the moment, I see they have a deal for $1/Mbps. Presumably someone like Jeff Atwood can get twice as good a deal as that, so he'd pay around $500/month for bandwidth for those servers. Going by the cheat sheet (<a href="https://blog.cloudvertical.com/2012/10/aws-cost-cheat-sheet-2/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.cloudvertical.com/2012/10/aws-cost-cheat-sheet-...</a>), that is within a factor of 2 of a yearly-reserved h1.4xlarge ($2263/month * 0.47 savings = $1199). It's almost equal to the three-year reserved machine ($2263 * 0.30 = $678).<p>Edit: He probably only needs 1 Gbps for all 4 machines, driving his bandwidth costs down by a factor of 4, but we could start to take power/space/cooling costs into account at that point.<p>So is he getting a better deal than that? I'd love to know where.
Hardware is cheap, programmers are expensive. System admins even more so. For this reason I feel like cloud hosting providers are the way to go for bootstrappers or startups. Once you get big you can do things like FB and create your own datacenter. However the enjoyment and power that comes from having full control over your entire environment should never be over looked.
maciej from pinboard has written some useful stuff on this too:<p>- The five stages of hosting: <a href="http://blog.pinboard.in/2012/01/the_five_stages_of_hosting/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.pinboard.in/2012/01/the_five_stages_of_hosting/</a><p>- Building servers: <a href="http://blog.pinboard.in/2012/05/a_cloud_of_my_own/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.pinboard.in/2012/05/a_cloud_of_my_own/</a><p>- Going colo: <a href="http://blog.pinboard.in/2012/06/going_colo/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.pinboard.in/2012/06/going_colo/</a><p>A bunch of people are probably going to respond to Jeff's article by saying things like, "But VPS hosting means you get other people to deal with problems for you", but in reality all that means is that you're at maciej's "monastery" or "dorm room" stage of hosting, and your needs haven't yet driven you to get "the apartment".
<i>"...you don't need the redundancy, geographical backup, and flexibility that comes with cloud virtualization"</i><p>This is perhaps the single most glossed over topic in the entire article. If I am a 1-5 person shop, maintaining a web app, virtualized hosting pays huge dividends in that I <i>don't even notice</i> if a hard drive or motherboard takes a dump. There are additional costs that come with the benefit of being abstracted away from hardware failure or geographic problems (building fire, power out, etc), and that's something that every business has to evaluate for itself.
i've known this secret for a while.
i went from paying $4k+/month spanning over 10+ servers in amazon ec2, to just 2 dedicated servers < $1k/month in an unlimited 1gig colo.
the performance difference i see is huge. i never realized how actually slow EC2 is. their issue is definitely in slow IO, which i think only their SSD instances can fix (which will cost me in the $8k+).<p>i now have a wicked setup, Xenserver Cloud, SAN, all Highly Available, don't have to worry about bandwidth overcharges, and much much faster .
I much prefer the middle ground of dedicated servers over the hassle of colocation and hardware management. (16GB RAM quad core with 2TB raid1 from OVH for £65 a month are a good affordable level, and very quick and easy to spin up new ones).
Network connectivity is one very big problem. What good is a blazing fast server with 2Mbps (disruptive!) link? This is the very reason a lot of people would hate their own servers. Cloud = <i>connectivity</i> + (computing power)
Yay! for connectivity.
<p><pre><code> > But not the kind that go in your home. No, that'd be as nuts as the now-discontinued Windows Home Server product.
</code></pre>
What's wrong with home servers? I've been wanting to build one for quite some time.
What happens when a HDD starts to go out? Do you have to pay & trust colo personnel to replace it, or do you have to pay to have your server shipped back to you?<p>I could see putting my own server into a colo if it were like a storage locker - carry/cart your server into the building, mount it in the rack you've rented, plug into the provided power and network connections, and lock the security door.
Why is Jeff building a server when he can get the EXACT same server at Hetzner [1] for just 79 euro per month.<p>That translates to literally the exact same 3 year cost as building the server.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-produktmatrix-ex" rel="nofollow">http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-pr...</a>
Happy rackmount home server user here, running ESXi with a load of dev instances, staging servers, OpenIndiana for ZFS running decent amount of storage connected to my editing workstations, databases, plus looks after our family video and photos.<p>I still use our company servers that are co-located but having things at home on the same network where you are developing is very compelling for me.<p>Its very quiet and cool (latest i7 processor).<p>But if you are hosting your own production boxes, I usually buy from HP or Dell and know that I rarely need to worry about those machines. Would hardly ever build a box to put into production unless it was something that was rather more specialized.
I always say that there got to be an ec2-like solution but with real hardware.<p>Provisioning physical machines at the same convenience level as ec2 would be awesome.<p>I ended up doing what Jeff did. Bought my own server and hosted it at HE for $75/month. It's xeon 5650 with 48GB Ram + 1TB disk for $2k. Assuming the machine will last 3 years, it's a $131/month. That's way cheaper than the closest that softlayer offers (<a href="https://www.softlayer.com/Sales/orderServer/41/2087/" rel="nofollow">https://www.softlayer.com/Sales/orderServer/41/2087/</a>)<p>Most of the times, EC2 is really about convenience and not cost.
I love building servers, it is amazingly geeky fun. And no doubt colocation with your own servers will give you the best bang for your buck, with renting a dedicated server coming in second. But you do have to be careful about redundancy. If you can't do without a day or two down-time, you'll need 2 or more servers, because when it's a dedicated server it's all up to you (or to someone you hire/pay for) when something fails.<p>Sadly I live a 5 hour drive from the nearest co-location facility, so I'm forced to rent a dedicated server.
The core of this article is that you get more performance for your money by building your own servers and racking them. I think we can all agree there.<p>The problem with "hardware is cheap and programmers are expensive" is that your hardware will fail when you least expect it and have programmers sitting idle. Hardware is cheap, so have someone else assemble it and rack it.<p>If you don't need it up all of the time, this is a great way to get a lot of performance -- IO and memory in particular.
Here is an incredibly lengthly argument which tries to be more balanced: <a href="http://rossduggan.ie/blog/infrastructure/cloud-vs-metal-infrastructure/" rel="nofollow">http://rossduggan.ie/blog/infrastructure/cloud-vs-metal-infr...</a><p>Jeff is glossing over a lot.<p>If you're already massively invested in hardware, in terms of people, processes and hardware, then you could argue that cloud architecture is less valuable in the general case, otherwise, it's usually no contest.
Did nobody notice that his AWS figures are totally wrong? AWS is expensive as hell, but even still $1400/month for 3 instances immediately looked incredibly wrong to me.<p>>The instance types included in the Web Application customer sample are 2 small (for the front end), and 1 large (for the database).<p>Nope, the instance types are 2 small for web, 2 small for app, and 2 large for DB. That's fully double what he's claiming it is. And he's ignoring the 4 300GB EBS volumes that are in that $1400/month as well as the load balancer and 120GB of bandwidth. And that is entirely on-demand instances, if you are comparing to a colo setup, you should be using the much cheaper reserved instances.