Comment by tsak
2 months ago
But aren't those the same startups that think they need to run on AWS EKS instead of using a single cheap server? The cheapest used Hetzner server currently is €39.24 / month:
- Intel Core i7-6700 - 32 GB - 2 x 480 GB Datacenter SSD - 1 GB/s - 20 TB traffic
Their VPS are even cheaper. And you can run a lot on this.
Similar to my favourite OVH servers, but I have unlimited traffic at 0.5Gb/s 64gb ram and dual mics. Similar price (with vat in Poland).
If you wanted to run same workloads on Aws it would cost you few hundred euro a month.
I see a silver lining to all this. At least maybe the silly "throw more horizontal scaling at it" will stop being a default response to all performance problems and people that are able to squeeze more processing out of the same hardware will be sought after again.
If your only need is a lot of bandwidth with very low server CPU use that’s fine.
That CPU is ancient, though. Over a decade old. That DRAM is 2-channel DDR3.
This could be a good deal for someone, but entrusting your startup’s operations to a 10 year old slow computer in Germany instead of using EKS would be an extremely short sighted move. A startup should be developing software and shipping it quickly to validate the market, not pinching pennies to save the equivalent of a couple hours of developer salary.
I said the same thing to myself.
But then I remembered that what AWS gives you is the same generation of CPU, just obfuscated.
GCP Also obfuscates it, but not as much: https://docs.cloud.google.com/compute/docs/general-purpose-m...
(note: skylake is 10 years old)
>That CPU is ancient, though. Over a decade old.
Coincidentally so are the t3 / t3a instances on AWS that everyone loves to use especially for dev/staging environments
10 years is where hardware failure rates start ramping quickly, in my experience.
Not necessarily obvious failures, but subtle errors, memory problems (like this case without an ECC capable CPU) and little instabilities.
With cloud instances I can migrate to a new instance with a couple clicks if I want.
Trying to save a couple hundred euros per month on hosting costs needs to be balanced against the risks and extra developer time.
For personal projects these old instances can be an excellent deal though.
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I would guess that 99.9% of startups wouldn't notice the age of the CPU if they aren't in the business for CPU compute power.
Also, if you don't want to provision software systems, you probably shouldn't use Kubernetes at all. Both this and compute are niche businesses and neither would rent a budget server anyway.
> That CPU is ancient, though. Over a decade old. That DRAM is 2-channel DDR3.
6700 should be DDR4 unless they're using some weird-ass setup.
While I agree with the last sentence, I would suggest you buy what is needed not what is latest.
Except 40€ a month is extremely poor value for this CPU that's more than a decade old.
Is it? It's 10x the price on GCP:
https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator?dl=CjhDaVEyWWpJ...
The CPU is the same generation; https://docs.cloud.google.com/compute/docs/general-purpose-m...
No, that's actually a really good deal for dedicated hardware with those specs. For a project sized for hardware like that, the CPU is a lot less relevant than the RAM and storage and transfer.
If you need more power check out the AX line of dedicated servers: https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ax/
8 threads at 3.4 GHz, 8MB cache. Seems fine, depending on your use case.
Measuring CPUs by thread count and clock speed is not a good way to gauge performance. A current gen CPU would be several times faster than this old CPU.
Depending on workload, this old CPU might be as slow as a 2 thread or even 1 thread current gen server.
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For the 5 api requests a second most projects will get, it'll probably do.
> Except 40€ a month is extremely poor value for this CPU that's more than a decade old.
This is a rather baffling opinion to have. All cloud providers charge far more for a virtualized instance running on God knows what hardware. You are faced with a deal where you can run your software on bare metal, and you complain about... About what exactly?
Except you're getting a couple of disks, many GB of RAM, and some on-site 24/7 support, limitless network traffic, and your electricity bill.
Not too bad considering.