Comment by softfalcon
3 years ago
Yeah, but if I'm a startup and running only a small server, the cloud hosting costs are minimal. I'm not sure how you think it's cheaper to host tiny servers in lots of countries and pay someone to manage that for you. You'll need IT in every one of those locations to handle the service of your "small servers".
I run services globally for my company, there is no way we could do it. The fact that we just deploy containers to k8s all over the world works very well for us.
Before you give me the "oh k8s, well you don't know bare metal" please note that I'm an old hat that has done the legacy C# ASP.NET IIS workflows on bare metal for a long time. I have learned and migrated to k8s on AWS/GCloud and it is a huge improvement compared to what I used to deal with.
Lastly, as for your CDN discussion, we don't just host CDN's globally. We also host geo-located DB + k8s pods. Our service uses web sockets and latency is a real issue. We can't have 500 ms ping if we want to live update our client. We choose to host locally (in what is usually NOT a small server) so we get optimal ping for the live-interaction portion of our services that are used by millions of people every day.
You don't need IT in every location or even different hosting facility contracts. Most colo hosting companies have multiple regions. From the 800lb gorilla (Equinix):
https://www.equinix.com/data-centers
Or a smaller US focused colo provider:
https://www.coresite.com/data-centers/locations
Between vendor (Dell, HP, IBM, etc) and the remote hands offered by the hosting facility you don't ever have to have a member of your team even enter a facility. Anywhere. Depending on the warranty/support package the vendor will dispatch someone to show up to the facility to replace failed components with little action from you.
The vendor will be happy to ship the server directly to the facility (anywhere) and for a nominal fee the colo provider will rack it and get IPMI, iLo, IP KVM, whatever up for you to do your thing. When/if something ever "hits the fan" they have on site 24 hour "remote hands" that can either take basic pre-prescribed steps/instructions -or- work with your team directly and remotely.
Interestingly, at my first startup we had a facility in the nearest big metro area that not only hosted our hardware but also provided an easy, cheap, and readily available meeting space:
https://www.coresite.com/data-centers/data-center-design/ame...
> the cloud hosting costs are minimal
Disagreed. The cloud equivalent of a small server is still a few hundred bucks a month + bandwidth. Sure, it's still a relatively small cost but you're still overpaying significantly over the Hetzner equivalent which will be sub-$100.
> pay someone to manage that for you
The same guy that manages your AWS can do this. Having bare-metal servers doesn't mean renting colo space and having people on-site - you can get them from Hetzner/OVH/etc and they will manage all the hardware for you.
> The fact that we just deploy containers to k8s all over the world works very well for us.
It's great that it works well for you and I am in no way suggesting you should change, but I wouldn't say it would apply to everyone - the cloud adds significant costs with regards to bandwidth alone and makes some services outright impossible with that pricing model.
> We also host geo-located DB
That's a complex use-case that's not representative of most early/small SaaS which are just a CRUD app backed by a DB. If your business case requires distributed databases and you've already done the work, great - but a lot of services don't need that (at least not yet) and can do just fine with a single big DB server + application server and good backups, and that will be dirt-cheap on bare-metal.
Claiming that Hetzner is equivalent is fallacious. The offerings are completely different.
Agreed on networking though!
In context of a "small server", I think they are equivalent. AWS gives you a lot more functionality but you're unlikely to be using any of it if you're just running a single small "pet" server.