alt Hacker Newsi just use Hetzner.
Everything which cloud companies provide just cost so much, my own postgres running with HA setup and backup cost me 1/10th the price of RDS or CloudSQL service running in production over 10 years with no downtime.
i directly autoscales instances off of the Metrics harvested from graphana it works fine for us, we've autoscaler configured via webhooks. Very simple and never failed us.
i don't know why would i even ever use GCP or AWS anymore.
All my services are fully HA and backup works like charm everyday.
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Companies buy cloud services because they want to reduce in-house server management and operations, for them it's a trade-off with hiring the right people. But you are right, when you can find the right people doing it yourself can be a lot cheaper.
Agree, I used to always use Heroku or Render style platforms for my own software, but nowadays I just have a Linux server with Docker Compose and a Cron job. The cron job every minute runs docker pull (downloads latest image) and docker up -d (switches to new version only if there is a new version). And put caddy in front for the HTTPS. This has been very cheap and reliable for years now.
Especially these days you can SSH to a baremetal server and just tell Claude to set up Postgres. Job done. You don't need autoscaling because you can afford a server that's 5X faster from the start.
I find it interesting that Hetzner was never a consideration, until... LLMs started recommending them.
we've done both. Hetzner dedicated was genuinely fine, until a disk started throwing SMART warnings on a Sunday morning and we remembered why we pay 10x elsewhere for some things. probably less about the raw cost and more about which weekends you want back.
Honestly I like Hetzner a lot but lately it has been very unstable for us. https://status.hetzner.com/ this page always has couple of incidents happening at the same time. I really appreciate the services they provide but i wish they were more stable.
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Because if I have a government service with millions of users, I don’t want the cheap shitter servers to crap out on me.
An employee is going to cost anywhere between 8k and 50k per month. Hiring an employee to save 200/month on servers by using a shitty VPS provider is not saving you any money.
I founded a hosting company 25 years ago when User-Mode Linux was the hot new virtualisation tech. We aspired to just replicate the dedicated server experience because that was obviously how you deploy services with the most flexibility, and UML made it so cheap! Through the 2010s I (extremely wrongly) assumed that being metered on each little part of their stack was not something most developers would choose, for the sake of a little convenience.
Does a regular 20-something software engineer still know how to turn some eBay servers & routers into a platform for hosting a high-traffic web application? Because that is still a thing you can do! (I've done it last year to make a 50PiB+ data store). I'm genuinely curious how popular it is for medium-to-big projects.
And Hetzner gives you almost all of that economic upside while taking away much of the physical hassle! Why are they not kings of the hosting world, rather than turning over a modest €367M (2021).
I find it hard to believe that the knowledge to manage a bunch of dedicated servers is that arcane that people wouldn't choose it for this kind of gigantic saving.