As a bootstrapped dev, reading stories like these gives me so much anxiety. I just can’t bring myself to use AWS even despite its advantages.

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throwawayffffas 41 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Do not buy into the hype, AWS and all the other cloud providers are extremely over priced.

If you don't have a specific need for a specific service they are offering stay away, it's a giant ripoff.

If you need generic stuff like VMs, data storage, etc. You are much better of using Hetzner, OVH, etc, and some standalone CDN if you need one.

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themafia 44 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The documentation is thick but it has a common theme and format to it. So once you get the hang of finding the "juicy bits" you can usually locate them anywhere. The docs do generally warn you of these cases, or have a whole "best practices" section which highlights them directly.

The key is, do not make decisions lightly in the cloud, just because something is easy to enable in the UI does not mean it's recommended. Sit down with the pricing page or calculator and /really/ think over your use case. Get used to thinking about your infrastructure in terms of batch jobs instead of real time and understand the implementation and import of techniques like "circuit breakers."

Once you get the hang of it it's actually very easy and somewhat liberating. It's really easy to test solutions out in a limited form and then completely tear them down. Personally I'm very happy that I put the effort in.

	▲	throwawayffffas 37 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I am 100% not willing to put that much effort into it. Actually I am not willing to spend that much time reading "cloud" provider docs and best practices. What I care about is hosting services and getting the mission done. I value predictable and reasonable costs much more than "flexibility". In general whatever host I have ever used typically have "cloud" offerings too. So real services go to dedicated hosts, experiments go into 5 buck a month vms.

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thecodemonkey 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

We are also 100% customer-funded. AWS makes sense for us for the enterprise version of Geocodio where we are SOC2 audited and HIPAA-compliant.

We are primarily using Hetzner for the self-serve version of Geocodio and have been a very happy customer for decades.

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abigail95 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What is a bootstrapped dev?

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jabroni_salad 7 hours ago | parent [-]

It means you are self funded and do not have a pile of other people's money to burn.

	▲	abigail95 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I would guess that's most AWS accounts. I have my 5 personal accounts all on one debit card. I learned AWS the same way most "bootstrapped" people do, with the free tier. Maybe it's more of a minefield than it was a decade ago.