I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars (opens in new tab)

That being said, the cloud does have a lot of advantages:

- You're getting a lot of services readily available. Need offsite backups? A few clicks. Managed database? A few clicks. Multiple AZs? Available in seconds.

- You're not paying up-front costs (vs. investing hundreds of dollars for buying server hardware) and everything is available right now [0]

- Peak-heavy loads can be a lot cheaper. Mostly irrelevant for you average compute load, but things are quite different if you need to train an LLM

- Many services are already certified according to all kinds of standards, which can be very useful depending on your customers

Also, engineering time and time in general can be expensive. If you are a solo entrepreneur or a slow growth company, you have a lot of engineering time for basically free. But in a quick growth or prototyping phase, not to speak of venture funding, things can be quite different. Buying engineering time for >150€/hour can quickly offset a lot of saving [1].

Does this apply to most companies? No. Obviously not. But the cloud is not too expensive - you're paying for stuff you don't need. That's an entirely different kind of error.

[0] Compared to the rack hosting setup described in the post. Hetzner, Linode, etc. do provide multiple AZs with dedicated servers.

[1] Just to be fair, debugging cloud errors can be time consuming, too, and experienced AWS engineers will not be cheaper. But an RDS instance with solid backups-equivalent will usually not amortize quickly, if you need to pay someone to set it up.

One thing to remember is that you do need to treat your servers as "cloud servers" in the sense that you should be able to re-generate your entire setup from your configuration at any time, given a bunch of IPs with freshly-installed base OSs. That means ansible or something similar.

If you insist on using cloud (virtual) servers, do yourself a favor and use DigitalOcean, it is simple and direct and will let you keep your sanity. I use DO as a third-tier disaster recovery scenario, with terraform for bringing up the cluster and the same ansible setup for setting everything up.

I am amused by the section about not making friends saying this :-) — most developer communities tend to develop a herd mentality, where something is either all the rage, or is "dead", and people are afraid to use their brains to experiment and make rational decisions.

Me, I'm rather happy that my competitors fight with AWS/Azure access rights management systems, pay a lot of money for hosting and network bandwith, and then waste time on Kubernetes because it's all the rage. I'll stick to my boring JVM-hosted Clojure monolith, deployed via ansible to a cluster of physical servers and live well off the revenue from my business.

Quant happy, boss happy, all good. Then the boss goes for lunch with someone and comes back slightly disturbed. We were not buzzword compliant. Apparently the other guy made him feel that he was using outdated tech by not being on AWS, using auto-scaling etc;

Here I am, from a background where my first language was 8086 assembly, and compactness was important to me. I remember thinking, "This whole thing could run on a powerful calculator, except for the RAM requirement".

It was a good lesson for me. Most CTOs know this bias and have unnecessarily huge and wasteful budgets but make sure they keep the business heads happy in the comfort that the firm is buzzword compliant. Efficiency and compactness are a marketing liability for IT heads!

This means that teams must make an up-front architectural decision to develop apps in a server-agnostic manner, and developers must stay disciplined to keep components portable from day one, but you can get a lot of mileage out of free credits without burning dollars on any infrastructure. The biggest challenge becomes finding the time to perform these migrations among other competing priorities, such as new feature development, especially if you're growing fast.

Our startup is mostly built on Google Cloud, but I don't think our sales rep is very happy with how little we spend or that we're unwilling to "commit" to spending. The ability to move off of the cloud, or even just to another cloud, provides a lot of leverage in the negotiating seat.

Cloud vendors can also lead to an easier risk/SLA conversation for downstream customers. Depending on your business, enterprise users like to see SLAs and data privacy laws respected around the globe, and cloud providers make it easy to say "not my problem" if things are structured correctly.

My recollection from working at a tech company in the early 2010s is that renting rack space and building servers was expensive and time consuming, estimating what the right hardware configuration would be for your business was tricky, and scaling different services independently was impossible. also having multi regional redundancy was rare (remember when squarespace was manually carrying buckets of petrol for generators up many flights of stairs to keeps servers online post sandy?[1]).

AWS fixed much of that. But maybe things have changed in ways that meaningfully changes the calculus?

[1] https://www.squarespace.com/press-coverage/2012-11-1-after-s...

The issues are mostly in the SME segment and where it really depends on what your business is. Do you need completely separate system for each customer? In that case, AWS is going to be easier and probably cheaper. Are you running a constant low 24/7? Then you should consider buying your own servers.

It's really hard to apply a blanket conclusion to all industries, in regards to cloud cost and whether or not it's worth it. My criticism in regards to opting for cloud is that people want all the benefits of the cloud, but not use any of the features, because that would lock them into e.g. AWS. If you're using AWS as a virtual machine platform only, there's always going to be cheaper (and maybe better) options.

At the time I did this no one had good gaming CPUs in the cloud, they are still a bit rare really especially in VPS offerings and I was hosting a gaming community and server. So I made a pair of machines in a 1U with dual machines in there and had a public and private server with raid 1 drives on both and redundant power. Ran that for a gaming server for many years until it was obsolete. It wasn't difficult and I think the machine was about £1200 in all, which for 2 computers running game servers wasn't too terrible.

I didn't do this because it was necessarily cheaper, I did it because I couldn't find a cloud server to rent with a high clockspeed CPU in it. I tested numerous cloud providers, sent emails asking for specs and after months of chasing it down I didn't feel like I had much choice. Turned out to be quite easy and over the years it saved a fortune.

The biggest threat to cloud vendors is that everyone wakes up tomorrow and cost optimizes the crap out of their infrastructure. I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to say that global cloud spending could drop by 50% in 3 months if everyone just did a good audit and cleaned up their deployments.

Is your time worth more than what the fully managed services on AWS cost? And I mean that quite literally in the sense of your billable hours.

If you like spending time tinkering with manually configuring linux servers, and don't have anything else that generates better value for you to do - by all means go for it.

For small pet projects with no customers, a cheap Hetzner box is probably fine. For serious projects with customers that expect you to be able to get back on your feet quickly when shit hits the fan, or teams of developers that lose hours of productivity when a sandbox environment goes down, maybe not so much.

Is AWS more expensive than the salary of the infra guy you would need to hire to do all this stuff by hand? Probably not.

> The whole debate of “is this still the cloud or not” is nonsense to me. You’re just getting lost in naming conventions. VPS, bare metal, on-prem, colo, who cares what you call it. You need to put your servers somewhere. Sure, have a computer running in your mom’s basement if that makes you feel like you’re exiting the cloud more, I’ll have mine in a datacenter and both will be happy.

However, one situation where I think the cloud might be useful is for archive storage. I did a comparison between AWS Glacier Deep Storage and local many-hard-drive boxes, for storing PB-scale backups, and AWS just squeaked in as slightly cheaper, but only because you only pay for the amount you use, whereas if you buy a box then you have to pay for the unused space. And it's off-site, which is a resilience advantage. And the defrosting/downloading charge was acceptable at effectively 2.5 months worth of storage. However, at smaller scales you would probably win with a small NAS, and at larger scales you'd be able to set up a tape library and fairly comprehensively beat AWS for price.

For this guy who spent thousands per month on AWS, using AWS makes no sense.

For a guy like me whose AWS bill was 38 cents last month, AWS makes a lot of sense. Currently I have a small KaiOS app with about 1000 unique visitors per month hosted on AWS. I used to self-host on an old laptop, but it costs less money to host on AWS (1 kwh cost me 19.89 cents and my laptop uses about 4.5kwh per month). Not to mention the convenience of not having to restart my server for software updates, or update my own certs every 3 months, or fuddling with nginx configurations.

And my AWS bill ever starts climbing, I will just self host once again.

why? why be so obnoxious to other people who you claim are being obnoxious to you. no need to read your blog post now/

He could have summed up with "AWS is expensive, host your own server instead".

I once got into an argument with a lead architect about it and it's really easy to twist the conversation into "don't you think we'll reach that scale?" To justify complexity.

The bottom line is for better or worse, the cloud and micro services are keeping a lot of jobs relevant and there's no benefit in convincing people otherwise

vcpu, iops, transfer fees, storage -- they are all resources going into a pool .

If Hetzner is giving you 10TB for $100 , then host your static files/images there and save $800.

Apps are very modular. You have services, asyncs, LBs, static files . Just put the compute where it is most cost effective.

You don't have to close your AWS account to stick it to the man. Like any utility, just move your resources to where they are most affordable.

On AWS an Aurora RDS is not cheap. But I don't have to spend time or money on an admin.

Is the cost justified? Because that's what cloud is. Not even talking about the level of compliance I get from having every layer encrypted when my hosted box is just a screwdriver away from data getting out the old school way.

When I'm small enough or big enough, self managed makes sense and probably is cheaper. But when getting the right people with enough redundancy and knowledge is getting the expensive part...

But actually - I've never seen this in any if these arguments so far. Probably because actual time required to manage a db server is really unpredictable.

BTW in-case you've missed it [1] Anthropic is offering $250 free credits till Nov 18 for their new Claude Code on the Web [2] for Clause Pro/Max users.

[1] https://x.com/adocomplete/status/1985766988724244839

[2] https://claude.ai/code

Turns out most of the developers suck at handling barebones with a Linux distro + nginx and some other plugins to do the same things as the fancy-named aws stuff. If you are in the same boat, just know that most of these developers suck at what they are doing and don't care about the company budget.

You can get 99.99% of the things done with barebone + Cloudflare, including multiserver redundancy, at a fraction of AWS and Azure costs. Most of these technologies are just fancy words for basic Linux services.

I was hoping to see more about porting AWS proprietary features into generic servers.

A big part of the problem isn't just monthly rent, it's vendor lock-in. When your whole system is implemented using AWS specific features, you're not going to run anywhere else.

AWS, and any other third party vendor, can and does obsolete features. Then you're having to port your system just to keep it running on the third party service.

Once you're implemented in a generic server, in a VPS, or your mom's basement, you're free to move to any other hosting provider, data center, whatever.

The loss of understanding that 3rd party dependencies are not good for your company or project, seems a bigger loss to the technical community than FTP hacking...

* off-site db backups

* a guaranteed db restore process

* auditable access to servers

* log persistence and integrity

* timely security patching

* intrusion detection

so that my employer can save money.

I built my own DIY cloud, a minimal self-hosted setup that lets me deploy apps, databases, and backups on cheap VPS or bare-metal servers. At first I just wanted to save money, but I realized that managing it can easily become a full-time SRE job.

Still, for small, experimental, or hobby projects, this setup works perfectly. It keeps costs predictable and gives full control without needing large-scale infrastructure.

https://diy-cloud.remikeat.com

Would love to hear from others who tried leaving managed clouds behind.

I'm quite sympathetic to on-prem but there's a possible argument against.

Both of these trucks can technically be used to pick up groceries and commute. But, uh, if you bought the semi-truck to get groceries and commute? Nobody scammed you; you bought the wrong truck. You don't have to buy the biggest, most expensive truck to do small jobs. But also, just because there's a cheaper truck available, doesn't mean the semi-truck is overpriced or a scam. The semi is more expensive for a reason.

I wonder about people who write articles like these. I imagine at one point he believed he had to use the cloud, so he started using it without understanding what he was doing. As a result, he was charged a ton of money. He then found out there were cheaper, simpler ways to do what he wanted. And so, feeling hurt, embarrassed, and deceived, he writes this long screed, accusing people of scamming him - I mean scamming you - because you (not him!) could not possibly need to use the cloud, even though you (not him!) assumed you had to use the cloud.

Yes, dude. The cloud is expensive. Sorry you found out the hard way. And for what it's worth, you don't need a datacenter either; stick a 1U in your closet and call it a day.

I recently read a fantastic comment or article on how developers, and IT workers in general, will be the first to be automated away, and groups like lawyers and doctors the last, entirely unrelated to how good LLMs and other AI models are at the specific tasks of each. Reason being that developers fall over themselves to prove how productive they are, happy to use all these tools. Anywhere else is concerned with job protection first and foremost. Metrics like SLOC having come from devs themselves in the chase of a raise.

This paragraph reminds me of that so much. Calling out those who push the cloud for job security. In basically every other sector - where this kind of behavior is 10x more prevalent - no one calls this out, there's a sense of solidarity and mutual understanding that this kind of thing is necessary.

This isn't judging one or the other to be good or bad. But it's going to cost devs very dearly.

I don't remember where I read it, they put it much better than I can - if anyone here recognizes it please drop a link.

At first I remember thinking they were behind the times, but now I'm certain they've avoided wasting a fortune on the cloud.

I don't think AWS is particularly expensive at all. In fact, it's rather cheap at quite a few things if you know what you're doing and use the right services. I've got all my server backups going to S3, for which I pay a whopping penny a month. I also host a handful of Docker images on ECR for 7 cents a month - way cheaper than any other private hosting service I know of.

Now RDS, and the equivalent at every other hosting provider I know of, gets quite pricey indeed. IMO, you shouldn't bother unless you have pretty serious needs for reliability and speed. Apt install your DB server of choice on bare metal goes quite far. Or possibly pull a container of it into whatever you're using to manage containers.

But why small businesses like them, I can’t I understand. I host all my stuff on Hetzner. It’s easy, it’s affordable and I “move fast”. I don’t need certificates to be able to manage the servers, and there is tone of information available online. But maybe it’s because I’m old, and I used to ssh to a Linux machine, git pull the latest version, and call in a “deploy”. But modern developed seems to be afraid of raw machines.

The only thing I miss is a good transactional email provider with PAYG pricing, and EU data residency.

However, there are cases where being able to spin down the server, and not pay for downtime is useful - like 36-core Yocto build machines.

The main reason why I keep coming back to cloud providers is databases. I don't feel comfortable setting up a high-availability db setup, and I don't want the responsibility of managing backups. But if you go to, say, Hetzner, you won't be able to use a cloud database in the same network.

Anybody have any guides or guidance on making the migration? I feel comfortable managing the VPS, but not sure what else I'd need to take on by moving to a dedicated server. I imagine hardware monitoring would be one, but what else?

Strawman arguments, ad hominem attacks and Spongebob mocking memes, and the casual venturing into conspiracy theories and malicious intentions...

> Why do all these people care if I save more money or not? ... If they’re wrong, and if I and more people like me manage to convince enough people that they’re wrong, they may be out of a job soon.

I have a feeling AWS is doing fine without him. Cloud is one of the fastest growing areas in tech because their product solves a need for certain people. There is no larger conspiracy to keep cloud in business by silencing dissent on Twitter.

> You will hear a bunch of crap from people that have literally never tried the alternative. People with no real hands-on experience managing servers for their own projects for any sustained period of time.

This is more of a rant than a thoughtful technical article. I don't know what I was expecting, because I clicked on the title knowing it was clickbait, so shame on me, I guess...

Is this what I'm missing by not having Twitter?

However, in most (every?) large organisations, buying a server and putting it in a DC, and looking after it, is hugely time-consuming, lengthy and expensive.

You need to get quotes, approvals, purchase, rack, commission, maintain etc etc. It is usually close to 1 year to get a server.

In some companies, even getting a virtual server takes almost as long!

With AWS, once an account and service is approved, boom, you are done.

Ideally, your company has technical experts who can do quite a lot of things non-cloud, so you can make informed decisions about near-term costs, complexity, vendor lock-in, execution speed, etc.

I'm especially a fan of cloud providers for early startups, which tend to be high on velocity, and low on workers. And the free credits programs often solve the early problem of being low on dollars.

People make all sorts of excuses: it's not secure, it's not reliable, it doesn't scale. These are primarily people who have never touched a server. If they had, they would know actual tradeoffs instead of excuses. So go and touch a server and learn how it works.

As far as I can tell, you'd almost have to do something with a colo if you didn't want to pay 10x or more for the storage. Are there other options?

But as soon as you start dealing with data sovereignty for your SaaS app, and need co-lo's in multiple geographies, each with their own contract/billing cycles, HA and backup, the global reach and consistency of the cloud providers starts seeming quite compelling again.

It may seem strange to you, but PHP servers work very well.

I think it's worth a try.

1. "It’s difficult to say these things without coming across as arrogant, but I’ve been managing servers since 2006."

You have experience manager servers, so for you it's not a big deal. But maybe software developers who aren't devops don't want to worry about it and just want to write code and ship a project?

2. If you're launching a new product as a solo developer, isn't it faster to just build an MVP on the cloud, validate the idea, get some traction, and eventually migrate to cheaper hosting if you do become the x% that gets product/market fit and do need to scale?

3. "Look, first of all, you’re as unique as the other 1000 peanut gallery enjoyers that have made the same astute observation before you. Congratulations. But you’re absolutely missing the point."

What's with the tone? Is it supposed to be funny? Does it help getting the point across?

This is simply collapsing the built for scale tools into a cacophony of open source tools.

You didn’t need it to begin with, you just didn’t know any better.

If you need a lot of, well, anything, be it compute, memory, storage, bandwidth etc., of course cloud stuff is going to be more expensive... but if you don't need that, then IMO $3/mo on-demand pricing really can't be beat when I don't have to maintain any equipment myself. Oracle also offers perpetually free VM instances if you don't mind the glow.

* at least I assume what this post is; I’m still waiting for it to load.

> Look, first of all, you’re as unique as the other 1000 peanut gallery enjoyers that have made the same astute observation before you. Congratulations. But you’re absolutely missing the point.

Im sure some of you may quip back, "it takes money to make money". No shit. Just dont get high on your own supply... Be smart, be scrappy, slow down.

Where a lot of companies go wrong is premature scaling and overengineering. As you might guess from the above, I don't run kubernetes. Reason, the smallest cluster I can manage would probably be more expensive than the entirety of my setup. Before I even deploy anything. And it might not be big enough even.

I also don't run a managed postgresql. I'd like to. But I can't justify dropping north of 300$/month on that currently. A single node vm with backups is good enough. For now. I might go active master - passive master. Do I need a 3 or more node cluster? Not right now. I might one day. I always have the option to upgrade. But until then my DB is going to not break the bank. So, I run with a more modest/risky setup. It's a managed risk. I can buy it off when that becomes relevant.

The other day, our CEO vibe coded a cost calculator thingy. He did a nice job. It had to be deployed somewhere. So, I used Cloud Run. Running a small thing with essentially no traffic is as close to free as you can get. I slapped some basic authentication on it and used a git hub action that we run from the freemium allocated build minutes each month. I reviewed our Github bills a few days ago over the years: The most we payed was a few months where we were running out of build minutes in 2024. I payed 55cents for one of those bills. Our setup is cloud based but frugal. I could probably lower our bills by double digit percentages by moving everything into Hetzner. But it's literally not worth my time.

Cloud on the cheap is just really good value. You can host low traffic static websites on Cloudflare. If you have a load balancer in Google cloud (25$/month or so) you can use buckets and their CDN for next to nothing as an alternative. A small Redis costs next to nothing. We run a slightly expensive vm for batch jobs for a maybe ~2 hours per month in total. Each job only takes a few minutes. The machine is suspended in between jobs and we only pay for the hours it runs. Next to nothing.

So, yes, you can get some bare metal in Hetzner or wherever for next to nothing. But then you need to manage that setup and you need to put the time in to do that. Your time even if you don't value it personally is just about the most scarce and expensive resource a startup has if you are the CTO. The difference between you doing valuable work that moves the company forward or you procrastinating and penny pinching over stuff that does not matter can literally make or break the company.

If you spend 5K on infrastructure per month, that's a the same as a very low salary for a full time person. If you are spending that much, definitely do something because it's an obscene amount. Especially if you are early stage and have no traffic. But if you need to put somebody on that that costs closer to 10K/month for a few weeks or months, that's a project that has a pretty high price tag as well. So cutting 5K down to 1K is worth doing. But spending 10K to cut 1K to 500/month is probably going to take you years to earn back. And you lose time doing it.

Our startup is bootstrapped. We run on a bit of revenue now and our savings for most of the past five years. Anything I spend on stuff that isn't needed literally is money that otherwise would go to my bank account (via a salary raise or bonus). I understand frugality. A lot of this stuff is people getting spoiled with investor cash and spending like there is no tomorrow. If you have no accountability you optimize the infrastructure for how good it makes your resume look, not for cost.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

― Upton Sinclair

I'd much rather read an article to know when it's NOT relevant to switch. Someone other than "vendor/service lock-in". I already know that

I love it!

FUCK CLOUD!

No, I've ran the numbers, and in doing so, realized that EC2 is the wrong solution for most problems. If you use the correct solution the price is highly competitive with your servers. One of the reasons being, I do not need to maintain servers.. I did that for 25 years and I absolutely hate it. The amount of time I save, which my company pays for, is ridiculous. I get a powerful security model, a unified API for managing everything, and expertly managed runtimes.

You're acting as if people only making $4k/mo in salary are making these decisions. You've got startup brain. Come back down to earth and reassess your position.

> you’re looking to save for the long run. Well, turns out buying your own servers is even cheaper in a long enough time frame

Yet another process I don't have to waste time on. "Capital purchasing" is extremely annoying (by design) in every single organization I've ever worked for or consulted with.

Like most "cloud cost analysis" this is extremely shallow and is apparently based upon the supposed "virality" of a single tweet.

...

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"P.S. follow me on Twitter"

So uh, not everything