> My 4565p is a $500 cpu... 32 vcpus... racked in a datacenter. The machine cost under 2k.

> The cloud provider charging $140 / mo for 3x less vcpus you break even in a couple months, it doesn't matter if it dies a few months later

How do you calculate break even in a couple months if the machine costs $2,000 and you still have to pay colo fees?

If your colo fees were $100 month you wouldn’t break even for over 4 years. You could try to find cheaper colocation but even with free colocation your example doesn’t break even for over a year.

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zackify 7 hours ago | parent [-]

the 140/mo is for 3x less vcpu, so $420/mo savings if you use all those same cores. sorry for the poor comparison wording there. in a few months already up to $1300+ by 6 months already paid the machine.

colo fees are cheap if you need more than just 1u. even with a 50-100 fee you easily get way more performance and come ahead within a year

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Aurornis 7 hours ago | parent [-]

> by 6 months already paid the machine.

You originally said “a couple months” but now it’s 6 months and assumption of $0 collocation fees which isn’t realistic

In my experience situations rarely call for precisely 32 cores for a fixed period of 3 years to support calculations like this anyway. We start with a small set of cloud servers and scale them up as traffic grows. Today’s tooling makes it easy to auto scale throughout the day, even.

When trying to rack a server everyone aims higher because it sucks to start running into limits unexpectedly and be stuck on a server that wasn’t big enough to handle the load. Then you have to start considering having at least two servers in case one starts failing.

Racking a single self-built server is great for hobby projects but it’s always more complicated for serving real business workloads.

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edoceo 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Don't nit-pick the "couple". It was used casually - like to mean not terribly long time. So the 2-6 spread, while technically big, is still just a trifle. While I'm nit-picking; up thread is talking about a limited box for CI and you're talking about scaling up real business workloads. That's just like the difference between 2 and 6. Give it a rest.

Everyone: run your scenarios and expectations in a spreadsheet and then use real data to run your CBA. Your case will be unique(ish) so make your case for your situation.

	▲	Aurornis 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> So the 2-6 spread, while technically big, is still just a trifle. I think you’re misreading. Even the 6 month thread was based on invalid assumptions of $0 collocation fees. Add in even cheap collocation fees and it’s pushed out even further That’s not really a nit pick when the claims were based on impossible math. It’s more of a Motte and Bailey where they come in with a “couple of months” claim that sounds awesome on the surface but then falls back to a completely different number if anyone looks at the details.
	▲	zackify 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		yeah thanks for that i was just meaning a very fast return

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jjmarr 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You can take a hybrid approach and use the rack for base capacity, cloud for scaling.