Right like learning AWS is significantly harder than buying a big server and maintaining it

rincebrain 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Many people who have ever had to deal with the long tail of insanities in physical hosting, like "the ceiling burst and dumped water on a rack", "the RAID controller's capacitors exploded and now you need to figure out what still works", or "for some reason three of the servers won't talk to this switch but talk to anything else using the same cables, and the switch ports work for other devices", would happily pay a premium to only deal with SaaS logistics.

(Those were all firsthand examples; I'm not saying everyone needs cloud providers, but there are reasons beyond "really good salespeople" that people opt for offloading those logistics.)

	▲	nixon_why69 29 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Ok but add up a trickle of those examples, with staff to handle them, and you're still comfortably in the black. You dont even have extra organizational overhead. Every cloud first company has a head of devops sitting in the chair where head of infra would be. They somehow wind up with like half the staffing anyways compared to running bare metal.
	▲	ericd an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Our colo experience was pretty smooth, nothing insane like that, and saved us a bundle. Apparently ymmv. I hate working with AWS APIs by comparison, some of the worst UX I've ever seen.
	▲	calvinmorrison an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I've dealt with both. I am continually amazed that people not only pay for AWS, but that it is so complicated, and that they use it in all sorts of absurd ways, not even just hosting 'vms' but using all sorts of amazon tools to do trivial tasks. I am sorry I just dont get it. Is it like learning salesforce and once you're sucked in you're just in? I am so glad I do not work at an AWS shop anymore and am very glad to be in a position where we do not use it.
	▲	late2part an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		or things like "Datacenter bombed by Iran..."

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icedchai an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I probably wouldn't start with buying a big server if I was just starting out. I would consider renting one from Hetzner, OVH, or many others.

There are also many other alternatives. Example: VPS providers like Vultr which have expanded to offer more traditional "cloud" features like object storage, load balancers, managed DBs, etc. Their pricing is way more competitive than AWS, especially when you consider bandwidth.