It doesn’t ignore that case, it simply allows them to shift blame whereas the no name vendor does not.

This is a major reason the cloud commands such a premium. It’s a way to make down time someone else’s problem.

The other factor is eliminating the “one guy who knows X” problem in IT. What happens if that person leaves or you have to let them go? But with managed infrastructure there’s a pool of people who know how to write terraform or click buttons and manage it and those are more interchangeable than someone’s DIY deployment. Worst case the cloud provider might sell you premium support and help. Might be expensive but you’re not down.

Lastly, there’s been an exodus of talent from IT. The problem is that anyone really good can become a coder and make more. So finding IT people at a reasonable cost who know how to really troubleshoot and root cause stuff and engineer good systems is very hard. The good ones command more of a programmer salary which makes the gap with cloud costs much smaller. Might as well just go managed cloud.

That's real microeconomics.

As someone who has set this up while not being a DBA or sysadmin.

Replication and backups really aren’t that difficult to setup properly with something like Postgres. You can also expose metrics around this to setup alerting if replication lag goes beyond a threshold you set or a backup didn’t complete. You do need to periodically test your backups but that is also good practice.

I am not saying something like RDS doesn’t have value but you are paying a huge premium for it. Once you get to more steady state owning your database totally makes sense. A cluster of $10-20 VPSes with NVMe drives can get really good performance and will take you a lot farther than you might expect.

For this kind of small scale setup, a reasonable backup strategy is all you need for that. The one critical part is that you actually verify your backups are done and work.

Hardware doesn't fail that often. A single server will easily run many years without any issues, if you are not unlucky. And many smaller setups can tolerate the downtime to rent a new server or VM and restore from backup.

One thing that will always stick in my mind is one time I worked at a national Internet service provider.

The log disk was full or something. That's not the shameful part though. What followed is a mass email saying everyone needs to update their connection string from bla bla bla 1 dot foo dot bar to bla bla bla 2 dot foo dot bar

This was inexcusable to me. I mean this is an Internet service provider. If we can't even figure out DNS, we should shut down the whole business and go home.

So can the cloud, and cloud has had more major outages in the last 3 months than I've seen on self-hosted in 20 years.

Deploys these days take minutes so what's the problem if a disk does go bad? You lose at most a day of data if you go with the 'standard' overnight backups, and if it's mission critical, you will have already set up replicas, which again is pretty trivial and only slightly more complicated than doing it on cloud hosts.

They, do, it isn't, cloud providers also go bad.

> Off site backups or replication would help, though not always trivial to fail over.

You want those regardless of where you host

Not as often as you might think. Hardware doesn’t fail like it used to.

Hardware also monitors itself reasonably well because the hosting providers use it.

It’s trivial to run a mirrored containers on two separate proxmox nodes because hosting providers use the same kind of stuff.

Offsite backups and replication? Also point and click and trivial with tools like Proxmox.

RAID is actually trivial to setup.l if you don’t compare it to doing it manually yourself from the command line. Again, tools like Proxmox make it point and click and 5 minutes of watching from YouTube.

If you want to find a solution our brain will find it. If we don’t we can find reasons not to.

> RAID is nontrivial to set up.

Skill issue?

It's not 2003, modern volume-managing filesystems (eg:ZFS) make creating and managing RAID trivial.

Lol this made me laugh, there's a reasonable likelihood that time will be filled with meetings.

Unironically - I agree. You should be outsourcing things that aren't your core competency. I think many people on this forum have a certain pride about doing this manually, but to me it wouldn't make sense in any other context.

Could you imagine accountants arguing that you shouldn't use a service like Paychex or Gusto and just run payroll manually? After all it's cheaper! Just spend a week tracking taxes, benefits and signing checks.

Self-hosting, to me, doesn't make sense unless you are 1.) doing something not offered by the cloud or a pathological use case 2.) or running a hobby project or 3.) you are in maintaince mode on the product. Otherwise your time is better spent on your core product - and if it isn't, you probably aren't busy enough. If the cost of your RDS cluster is so expensive relative to your traffic, you probably aren't charging enough or your business economics really don't make sense.

I've managed large database clusters (MySQL, Cassandra) on bare metal hardware in managed colo in the past. I'm well aware of the performance thats being left on the table and what the cost difference is. For the vast majority of businesses, optimizing for self hosting doesn't make sense, especially if you don't have PMF. For a company like 37signals, sure, product velocity probably is very high, and you have engineering cycles to spare. But if you aren't profitable, self hosting won't make you profitable, and your time is better spent elsewhere.

That’s pretty reductive. By that logic the opposite extreme is just as true: if using managed services is just as bad as outsourcing everything else, then a business shouldn’t rent real estate either—every business should build and own their own facility. They should also never contract out janitorial work, nor should they retain outside law firms—they should hire and staff those departments internally, every time, no nuance allowed.

You see the issue?

Like, I’m all for not procuring things that it makes more sense to own/build (and I know most businesses have piss-poor instincts on which is which—hell, I work for the government! I can see firsthand the consequences of outsourcing decision making to contractors, rather than just outsourcing implementation).

But it’s very case-by-case. There’s no general rule like “always prefer self hosting” or “always rent real estate, never buy” that applies broadly enough to be useful.

V2 scales to zero as of last year.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/introducing-scaling-to...

It only scales down after a period of inactivity though - it’s not pay-per-request like other serverless offerings. DSQL looks to be more cost effective for small projects if you can deal with the deviations from Postgres.

The performance disparity is just insane.

Right now from Hetzner you can get a dedicated server with 6c/12t Ryzen2 3600, 64GB RAM and 2x512GB Nvme SSD for €37/mo

Even if you just served files from disc, no RAM, that could give 200k small files per second.

From RAM, and with 6 dedicated cores, network will saturate long before you hit compute limits on any reasonably efficient web framework.