I dislike those black and white takes a lot. It's absolutely true that most startups that just run an EC2 instance will save a lot of cash going to Hetzner, Linode, Digital Ocean or whatever. I do host at Hetzner myself and so do a lot of my clients.

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.

You don't actually need any of those things until you no longer have a "project", but a business which will allow you to pay for the things you require.

You'd be amazed by how far you can get with a home linux box and cloudflare tunnels.

>most startups that just run an EC2 instance will save a lot of cash going to Hetzner, Linode, Digital Ocean or whatever. I do host at Hetzner myself and so do a lot of my clients. That being said, the cloud does have a lot of advantages:

When did Linode and DO got dropped and not being part of the cloud ?

What used to separate VPS and Cloud was resources at per second billing. Which DO and Linode along with a lot of 2nd tier hosting also offer. They are part of cloud.

Scaling used to be an issue, because buying and installing your hardware or sending it to DC to be installed and ready takes too much time. Dedicated Servers solution weren't big enough at the time. And the highest Core count at the time was 8 core Xeon CPU in 2010. Today we have EPYC Zen 6c at 256 Core and likely double the IPC. Scaling issues that requires a Rack of server can now be done with 1 single server and fit everything inside RAM.

Managed database? PlanetScale or Neon.

A lot of issues for medium to large size project that "Cloud" managed to solve are no longer an issue in 2025. Unless you are top 5-10% of project that requires these sort of flexibilities.

My pet peeves are:

1. For small stuff, AWS et al aren't that much more expensive than Hetzner, mostly in the same ballpark, maybe 2x in my experience.

2. What's easy to underestimate for _developers_ is that your self hosted setup is most likely harder to get third party support for. If you run software on AWS, you can hire someone familiar with AWS and as long as you're not doing anything too weird, they'll figure it out and modify it in no time.

I absolutely prefer self hosting on root servers, it has always been my go to approach for my own companies, big and small stuff. But for people that can't or don't want to mess with their infrastructure themselves, I do recommend the cloud route even with all the current anti hype.

> But the cloud is not too expensive - you're paying for stuff you don't need. That's an entirely different kind of error.

Agreed. These sort of takedowns usually point to a gap in the author's experience. Which is totally fine! Missing knowledge is an opportunity. But it's not a good look when the opportunity is used for ragebait, hustlr.

> A few clicks.

Getting through AWS documentation can be fairly time consuming.

> You're getting a lot of services readily available. Need offsite backups? A few clicks

I think it is a lot safer for backups to be with an entirely different provider. It protects you in case of account compromise, account closure, disputes.

If using cloud and you want to be safe, you should be multi-cloud. People have been saved from disaster by multi-cloud setups.

> You're not paying up-front costs (vs. investing hundreds of dollars for buying server hardware)

Not true for VPSes or rented dedicated servers either.

> Peak-heavy loads can be a lot cheaper.

they have to be very spiky indeed though. LLMs might fit but a lot of compute heavy spiky loads do not. I saved a client money on video transcoding that only happened once per upload and only over a month or two an year by renting a dedi all ear round rather than using the AWS transcoding service.

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

You have to do work to ensure things run across multiple availability zones (and preferably regions) anyway.

> But an RDS instance with solid backups-equivalent will usually not amortize quickly, if you need to pay someone to set it up.

You have more forced upgrades.

An unmanaged database will only need a lot of work if operating at large scale. If you are then its probably well worth employing a DBA anyway as an AWS or similar managed DB is not going to do all the optimising and tuning a DBA will do.

any serious business will(might?) have hundreds of Tbs of data. I store that in our DC and with a 2nd DC backup for about 1/10 the price of what it would cost in S3.

When does the cloud start making sense ?

I think compliance is one of the key advantages of cloud. When you go through SOC2 or ISO27001, you can just tick off entire categories of questions by saying 'we host on AWS/GCP/Azure'.

It's really shitty that we all need to pay this tax, but I've been just asked about whether our company has armed guards and redundant HVAC systems in our DC, and I wouldn't know how to do that apart from saying that 'our cloud provider has all of those'.

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

Another advantage is that if you aim to provide a global service consumed throughout the world then cloud providers allow you to deploy your services in a multitude of locations in separate continents. This alone greatly improves performance. And you can do that with a couple of clicks.

linode was better and had cheaper pricing before being bought by akamai

To me DO is a cloud. It is pricey (for performance) and convenient. It is possibly a wiser bet than AWS for a startup that wants to spend less developer (read expensive!) time on infra.

You're literally playing into what the author is criticizing.

I want more examples of people running the admin interface on prem and the user visible parts on the cloud.

I mean there are many places that sell multi AZ, hourly billed VPS/Bare Metal/GPU at a fraction of the cost of AWS.

I would personally have an account at one of those places and back up to there with everything ready to spin up instances and failover if you lose your rack, and use them for any bursty loads.

I started out with linode, a decade ago.

It became much more expensive than AWS, because it bundled the hard drive space with the RAM. Couldn't scale one without scaling the other. It was ridiculous.

AWS has a bunch of startup credits you can use, if you're smart.

But if you want free hosting, nothing beats just CloudFlare. They are literally free and even let you sign up anonymously with any email. They don't even require a credit card, unlike the other ones. You can use cloudflare workers and have a blazing fast site, web services, and they'll even take care of shooing away bots for you. If you prefer to host something on your own computer, well then use their cache and set up a cloudflare tunnel. I've done this for Telegram bots for example.

Anything else - just use APIs. Need inference? Get a bunch of Google credits, and load your stuff into Vertex or whatever. Want to take payments anonymously from around the world? Deploy a dapp. Pay nothing. Literally nothing!

LEVEL 2:

And if you want to get extra fancy, have people open their browser tabs and run your javascript software in there, earning your cryptocurrency. Now you've got access to tons of people willing to store chunks of files for you, run GPU inference, whatever.

Oh do you want to do distributed inference? Wasmcloud: https://wasmcloud.com/blog/2025-01-15-running-distributed-ml... ... but I'd recommend just paying Google for AI workloads

Want livestreaming that's peer to peer? We've got that too: https://github.com/Qbix/Media/blob/main/web/js/WebRTC.js

PS: For webrtc livestreaming, you can't get around having to pay for TURN servers, though.

LEVEL 3:

Want to have unstoppable decentralized apps that can even run servers? Then use pears (previously dat / hypercore). If you change your mindset, from server-based to peer to peer apps, then you can run hypercore in the browser, and optionally have people download it and run servers.

https://pears.com/news/building-apocalypse-proof-application...