I have also found that self-hosting, even with your own hardware, is usually cheaper than cloud hosting. We priced out a VM server at my company and we found we could rebuy the hardware for it every FIVE months, just from the cloud hosting costs. And that is if we were decently disciplined about turning VMs on and off every day (which we all knew was a fantasy).
I hear you. Personally I never understood the appeal of costly hosting at AWS and such. It just always seemed so expensive. The only benefit it provided, imho, is when you legitimately need to scale very quickly or if you’ve got a really huge variance in load.
Everything else? My own servers please, and thank you for reading 😁
What I read so far:
The dynamic scaling is what makes it worth it.
Many of the traditional hosting offerings just give you a monolithic VPS/dedicated hardware.
But if you want to up/downscale depending on peak demand during lunch hour it get’s complicated.
I believe you, but many people self host on rented hardware for various reasons. For example “proper” self hosting comes with upfront cost. But self hosting ln a VPS comes with reliability, uptime, predictability. But you’re still the master of the software you host, of backups, etc.
So, running a VM in the cloud is somehow different from “running everything in the cloud”? I’m genuinely confused here, willing to bet I’ve misunderstood something.
Operating and administering your own systems infrastructure requires that your business invest in the people to do so, this builds institutional knowledge which makes the important bit, the data and knowledge, portable. If the VM in the cloud gets too expensive you can use another provider, or you can buy hardware and run it locally. If the VM provider cuts your service you still have access to your data because you never lost control of it. Problems can be fixed by in house staff that don’t suddenly evaporate for arbitrary reasons or have service outages.
If your entire business depends on Microsoft services and it gets too expensive you have no options but to pay more. If your account gets locked then you’re out of business until you can get Microsoft to give you access again. If you want to migrate away, there isn’t another Microsoft to move your data to and you’ve replaced all of your technical staff with a support phone number, which isn’t currently accepting your calls.
I see. And the hardware (realistically for small businesses) one-time payment of say (quite overkill) $10 grand is somehow more prohibiting than adding the sysadmin(s) and whatnot to your payroll?
Sounds backwards to me.
A small 3-4 person office is probably saving way more money using cloud-based SAAS than hiring an IT team. The larger the company gets the less of an impact they would feel hiring more personnel or buying hardware.
It isn’t that these services are always bad. It’s just that, like everything in the tech sector, they’ve collectively reached the point where they’re enshittifying and trying to squeeze their existing customers rather than find new ways to add value.
Eventually the increasing costs will make alternatives more attractive.
The end result is the same:
You control what the machine does. The data as well as backups (assuming you arent using specific hardware offerings but just compute and storage)
Example:
I am done with AWS pricing and Azure gave me a fat stack credits to go over there.
Agnostic VMs could be backed up and migrated over to Azure.
Essentially the same as migrating Hyper-V or VMware to Proxmox-VE
And the day your VM host exits the market/bumps their prices/decided to pull the rug from under you, your backups that absolutely couldn’t be made in the SaaS instance will magically continue to exist outside of your Cloud VM setup?
It’s a VM that you set up, you have the image yourself, you could put it on a machine in your living room if you had to.
“I’m paying for a colocation of a machine I administer” is very different from “I’ve written my application such that it can only run inside an AWS system”
Vegetarians nowadays eat eggs, vegans wear leather and self-hosters do it on someone else’s computer.
I’m old and grumpy and will stick to calling the modern vegetarians lacto-ovo-vegetarians, tell the modern vegans that veganism is a lifestyle not a diet and insist that a VPS on Hetzner is hosted by Hetzner, even if you have to manage and maintain the VM.
Most of our customers are priced out of the hardware we bought zhrough the official distributor channel.
They hiked the prices to 100% of the previous batch.
Meanwhile we bought what we could from numerous resellers to make it DIY.
Not many small customers can afford to drop 10k on a mid/low tier enterprise grade hardware (2x 1.92TB TLC SSDs, RAID controller, Intel E-2434, 64GB DDR5 RAM)
A few months ago this was (fully assembled mind you) around 2-3k
Not that my tiny customers have enough of an IT budget to buy their own servers with the recent price hike on memory and ssds.
Self hosting doesn’t necessarily imply you need your own hardware.
I have also found that self-hosting, even with your own hardware, is usually cheaper than cloud hosting. We priced out a VM server at my company and we found we could rebuy the hardware for it every FIVE months, just from the cloud hosting costs. And that is if we were decently disciplined about turning VMs on and off every day (which we all knew was a fantasy).
I hear you. Personally I never understood the appeal of costly hosting at AWS and such. It just always seemed so expensive. The only benefit it provided, imho, is when you legitimately need to scale very quickly or if you’ve got a really huge variance in load.
Everything else? My own servers please, and thank you for reading 😁
What I read so far:
The dynamic scaling is what makes it worth it.
Many of the traditional hosting offerings just give you a monolithic VPS/dedicated hardware.
But if you want to up/downscale depending on peak demand during lunch hour it get’s complicated.
Use a Cronjob to turn the servers on or off.
Automate everything you can
I’m of the opposite opinion - would you mind elaborating on how a selfhosted-on-nonowned-hardware setup would work?
I believe you, but many people self host on rented hardware for various reasons. For example “proper” self hosting comes with upfront cost. But self hosting ln a VPS comes with reliability, uptime, predictability. But you’re still the master of the software you host, of backups, etc.
So, running a VM in the cloud is somehow different from “running everything in the cloud”? I’m genuinely confused here, willing to bet I’ve misunderstood something.
Operating and administering your own systems infrastructure requires that your business invest in the people to do so, this builds institutional knowledge which makes the important bit, the data and knowledge, portable. If the VM in the cloud gets too expensive you can use another provider, or you can buy hardware and run it locally. If the VM provider cuts your service you still have access to your data because you never lost control of it. Problems can be fixed by in house staff that don’t suddenly evaporate for arbitrary reasons or have service outages.
If your entire business depends on Microsoft services and it gets too expensive you have no options but to pay more. If your account gets locked then you’re out of business until you can get Microsoft to give you access again. If you want to migrate away, there isn’t another Microsoft to move your data to and you’ve replaced all of your technical staff with a support phone number, which isn’t currently accepting your calls.
I see. And the hardware (realistically for small businesses) one-time payment of say (quite overkill) $10 grand is somehow more prohibiting than adding the sysadmin(s) and whatnot to your payroll? Sounds backwards to me.
You’re right, it would depend on the business.
A small 3-4 person office is probably saving way more money using cloud-based SAAS than hiring an IT team. The larger the company gets the less of an impact they would feel hiring more personnel or buying hardware.
It isn’t that these services are always bad. It’s just that, like everything in the tech sector, they’ve collectively reached the point where they’re enshittifying and trying to squeeze their existing customers rather than find new ways to add value.
Eventually the increasing costs will make alternatives more attractive.
The end result is the same:
You control what the machine does. The data as well as backups (assuming you arent using specific hardware offerings but just compute and storage)
Example:
I am done with AWS pricing and Azure gave me a fat stack credits to go over there.
Agnostic VMs could be backed up and migrated over to Azure.
Essentially the same as migrating Hyper-V or VMware to Proxmox-VE
And the day your VM host exits the market/bumps their prices/decided to pull the rug from under you, your backups that absolutely couldn’t be made in the SaaS instance will magically continue to exist outside of your Cloud VM setup?
Veeam for example can do that pretty well.
So, yeah it can happen.
Or you extract the data from backup and migrate it to the new host and import it.
And thus administering the server yourself proved to be a waste of time and money as the SaaS was just as resilient? I’m still confused.
It’s a VM that you set up, you have the image yourself, you could put it on a machine in your living room if you had to.
“I’m paying for a colocation of a machine I administer” is very different from “I’ve written my application such that it can only run inside an AWS system”
Sure. But VPS and colocation are not the same, are they?
Vegetarians nowadays eat eggs, vegans wear leather and self-hosters do it on someone else’s computer.
I’m old and grumpy and will stick to calling the modern vegetarians lacto-ovo-vegetarians, tell the modern vegans that veganism is a lifestyle not a diet and insist that a VPS on Hetzner is hosted by Hetzner, even if you have to manage and maintain the VM.
deleted by creator
Most of our customers are priced out of the hardware we bought zhrough the official distributor channel.
They hiked the prices to 100% of the previous batch.
Meanwhile we bought what we could from numerous resellers to make it DIY.
Not many small customers can afford to drop 10k on a mid/low tier enterprise grade hardware (2x 1.92TB TLC SSDs, RAID controller, Intel E-2434, 64GB DDR5 RAM)
A few months ago this was (fully assembled mind you) around 2-3k