Comment by Nextgrid
3 years ago
> 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.