625
Could we please add a rule to ban musk spam?
(programming.dev)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2023
625 points (88.6% liked)
Technology
35003 readers
159 users here now
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.
Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
There are some costs that are cheaper when you go to the cloud because of scale. Things like bandwidth, redundancy, and physical security. But they are massively offset by how expensive renting the hardware is. I can rent a server for $500/month that I could build for $3,000-$4,000. That's 6-8 months before I'm in the red with the cloud. Think about those costs over one server's lifetime (roughly 5 years, depending on your needs). That's $26,000 over 5 years, or $5,200 per year extra, for one server. If your company is using 10 servers (assuming your costs scale linearly at this point), that's $52,000 per year, rather than just running a couple fiber lines into your office. And that's a small company.
So yeah, it's more expensive to go with the cloud, almost always. But yes, the cloud gives you benefits. This is pretty common knowledge in the industry, and musk didn't come up with the idea of bringing services on-site.
Something to add, since I colocate my own hardware in a datacenter: Just the cost of operating a server is non-trivial too. I pay $120/month for just 2U, 1gbps networking, and power usage (600W peak usage), providing my own hardware. Things get a lot cheaper if you can rent a whole rack space though. It's absolutely been worth it though, because to rent a similar specced server, it could easily be $1k/month.
That $52000/year isn't enough to pay for even a single full time IT person. So now you're probably either spending dev time on server admin (which is wasteful of dev salary, and it's a subject they aren't experts in, so you're literally paying more for worse results), or outsourcing to an entity that hires the cheapest employees it can.
Oooor, use a cloud provider. And if you're a small company, you can probably get away with cheaper shared hosting.
Oh I was talking about renting a VPS, not managed services. Managed services are much more expensive.
I just checked Digital Ocean’s pricing, and the server I was thinking of that’s about $500/month is $900/month for managed MySQL. That’s $107,400 extra per year if you want managed services.
And again, this is for a small company that only needs 10 servers. If we’re talking about something more like 5,000 servers, those cloud costs will be absolutely enormous.