Drew DeVault

https://cerebralab.com/Is_a_billion-dollar_worth_of_server_lying_on_the_ground

Re-posting an old fedi post of mine:

So, SourceHut is not hosted in anyone’s cloud. I own all of the hardware outright and colocate most of it in a local datacenter.

I just built a new server for git.sr.ht, and boy is she a beaut. It cost me about $5.5K as a one-time upfront cost, and now I just pay for power, bandwidth, and space, which runs about $650/mo for all of my servers (10+).

Ran back of the napkin numbers with AWS’s price estimator for a server of equivalent specs, and without even considering bandwidth usage it’d cost me almost TEN GRAND PER MONTH to host JUST that server alone on AWS.

AWS is how techbro startups pile up and BURN their investor money.

Nov 2, 2020 at 4:38pmWeb
Show threadKonstantin RyabitsevNov 2, 2020

@sir

AWS: throwing money at the problem as a service

Show threadcodesectionsNov 2, 2020

@sir

> [my new server] cost me about $5.5K as a one-time upfront cost, and now I just pay for power, bandwidth, and space, which runs about $650/mo for all of my servers (10+).

Is there some sort of trick to finding affordable colocation? I've not yet looked into it *that* thoroughly, but casual Internet searches always show either "price quotes on request" or prices that are about that much for space for a *single* server

Show threadDrew DeVaultNov 2, 2020

@codesections yeah, ask for that quote

Also price-per-U typically goes down with volume, I have a half rack

Show threadcodesectionsNov 2, 2020

@sir

> yeah, ask for that quote

Fair enough. And that's definitely what I'd do if I were more serious about it. My current hosting costs are $10/month
for a VPS, and my colo research has only gone as far as seeing if I could get within an order of magnitude of that (excluding upfront hardware, obviously).

Since it's clear that that's impossible, I haven't bothered to ask for quotes.

Show threadPort-humping pupperNov 2, 2020
@sir I'm all for burning investor's money, but not by spending it with a larger corporation than your market cap. Burn it on artisanal chairs and sit/stand desks.
Show threadabortretryfailNov 2, 2020
@sir
My favorite is the capex vs opex accounting shenanigans they play to make AWS look better on the budget. Ultimately it ends up costing more $$$ unless you rewrite all your programs to run with AWS in mind and lock in hard on their platform.
I want off this train...
Show threadLunch (--)Nov 2, 2020
@abortretryfail at my last job they heavily relied on Apache Kafka and they did the math and figured out that even if they did rewrite everything to work with AWS Kinesis (their in-house equivalent) they'd be paying over 3x as much as they did for the EC2 instances they ran the Kafka cluster on
Show threadabortretryfailNov 2, 2020
@lunch
I believe it. I'm sure the Amazon sales rep has lots of words words words about added value and how they can fire a sysadmin to make up the difference.
Show threadAdam SimpsonNov 2, 2020
@sir do you have a write up anywhere that contains more details about your servers for sourcehut? I’m curious about things like CPU architecture, firmware, specs etc.
Show threadDrew DeVaultNov 2, 2020
@adam https://man.sr.ht/ops/
Show threadIvan Sagalaev Nov 2, 2020
@sir that was one of the things that stopped me in my tracks when AWS started to become popular 10+ years ago. All my blogger friends wrote excited posts about how easy it was, but nobody even mentioned that it's like an order of magnitude more expensive than a Linux VPS.