Comment by gamerDude
4 months ago
When I'm working with new developers I always have to convince them to simplify their setup. Why are we on autoscaled, pay by the query infra when we are serving a few people. Then they complain how expensive it is. I had someone tell me that their costs were $1500/mon when they were in demo stages. I asked them why they aren't hosting on a single small server for $20. And they responded that it didn't matter because they were using free credits.
Except that those free credits will go away and you'll find yourself not wanting to do all the work to move it over when it would've been easier to do so when you just had that first monolith server up.
I think free credits and hyped up technology is to blame. So, basically a gamed onboarding process that gets people to over-engineer and spend more.
I'm not totally following the cost analysis from some of these comments. I agree that there's no reason to make your architecture overly complicated, especially if it will cost dev time. I'm not saying this as someone that does cloud very much. We normally do a single server. More as an outsider looking in.
If you load balance 4 smaller ec2 instances vs a larger one, it's significantly cheaper. There is overhead when you run the same app on 4 machines, but not as much as people think. An idle system uses 300-600mb of ram, leaving roughly 3.5gb vram usable, per machine.
4 t3.medium instances are about $119/mo, vs. an equivalent t3.2xlarge which is $238/mo.
Also people will often say Digital Ocean is cheaper, but they compare it to non-equivalent AWS services. A Digital Ocean VPS compared to an equivalent EC2 is about the same.
So I understand when people argue about complicating architecture or optimizing prematurely, but I don't think the math on actual server cost really checks out. I would prefer to do dedicated hosting, but Hetzner doesn't have that in the U.S.