Or rent a bare-metal machine from hetzner with 2-3x performance per core and 90% less costs[1].

[1] Various HN posts regarding Hetzner vs AWS in terms of costs and perf.

In my experience, a decently managed database scales very hard.

3x EX44 running Patroni + PostgreSQL would give you 64GB of working memory, at least 512 GB NVMe of dataset (configurable with more for a one-time fee) at HA + 1 maintenance node. Practically speaking, that would have carried the first 5 - 10 years of production at the company I work at with ease, for 120 Euros hardware cost/month + a decent sysadmin.

I also know quite a few companies who toss 3-4x 20k - 30k at DELL every few years to get a database cluster on-prem so that database performance ceases to be a problem (unless the application has bad queries).

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ethanwillis 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This might be true in terms of direct monetary costs.

I want to like Hetzner but the bureaucratic paper process of interacting with them and continuing to interact with them is just... awful.

Not that the other clouds don't also have their own insane bureaucracies so I guess it's a wash.

I'm just saying, I want a provider that leaves me alone and lets me just throw money at them to do so.

Otherwise, I think I'd rather simply deploy my own oversized server in a colo even with the insanely overpriced hardware prices currently.

edit: And shortly after writing this comment I see: "Microsoft won't let me pay a $24 bill, blocking thousands in Azure spending" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46124930

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earthnail 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Can you elaborate on what the bureaucracy is you experienced? I'm a Hetzner customer since last month and so far I thoroughly enjoy it. Have not encountered any bureaucracy yet.

	▲	ethanwillis an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I think I was still being a bit too harsh even after throwing into my comment that other providers aren't perfect either. But basically after the initial paperwork I had some issues with my account getting flagged even though I wasn't using it 99.999% of the time. It's not a huge deal for me because I wasn't trying them out for anything serious. I just questioned how often that might happen if I was actually using it seriously and what kind of headaches it could cause me while re-verifying everything with them. From people I know if everything is going good then their service is great. Server performance is good, pricing is good, etc.

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Nextgrid 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> I want a provider that leaves me alone and lets me just throw money at them to do so.

That’s been my experience with Hetzner.

A lot of people get butthurt that a business dares to verify who they’re dealing with as to filter out the worst of the worst (budget providers always attract those), but as long as you don’t mind the reasonable requirement to verify your ID/passport they’re hands-off beyond that.

	▲	ethanwillis an hour ago \| parent [-]
		That's fair and I don't have any major issues with that. I guess my concern on the bureaucracy is if you are unlucky enough to get flagged as a false positive it can be an annoying experience. And I can't really blame them too hard for having to operate that way in an environment of bad actors. You're definitely right that the budget providers do attract the types of people trying to do bad things/exploit them in some way.

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4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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