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Comment by otterley | Hacker News Reader

You might not be plugging in all inputs into your cost calculus -- namely, the amount of labor you spend reconfiguring your datacenter to accommodate change.

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I'm fairly old school (been running Linux since the 90's and servers since not long after), Ansible (or something like it) and clean documentation is way cheaper (for me) than something like AWS in the general case.

With the big advantage of when something goes sideways I can actually debug the problem, for the scale of most of the systems we run one client per VPS with a backup for some is just fine (though we are transitioning the spares onto a different provider from the primary after Linode took a pasting).

Also looking at getting a couple of beefy dedicateds down the line and running Xen for the stuff we really need to not be wiped out.

AWS is excellent for a given set of trade-offs but if you have a good Ops background you can save some money which is nice but (for me) more crucially you can access your entire stack and move wherever you want.

My experience is that the labor involved in maintaining an AWS setup is typically far higher than the labor involved in maintaining a system on leased hardware or managed hosting, because you still need to deal with the fallout of most types of failures, but without insight into what's going on below the hood or ability to set up a system geared specifically towards your workload.

Mine as well but this is contingent on having people on hand who can open the hood and troubleshoot, if not and you are weak on the OPS side or earning so much per customer that hosting is a secondary consideration then I can see the value in AWS, it's just not my default choice.

Also frankly I loathe dealing with AWS's web interfaces for anything - frankly they are embarrassingly bad for a company that prides itself on end user experience.

If you don't have people on hand who can "open the hood and troubleshoot" I'd argue you don't have people that can run a service on AWS reliably. The number of gotchas I've run into with AWS is far higher than what I've had to deal with with managed hosting or even bare metal hardware.

(I'm assuming you're talking metaphorically, as for my part we use onsite repair warranties to deal with failure of new hardware, and just replace old hardware except when it's something very obvious like a failed drive - it's rarely worth the trouble to do a lot of diagnostics at smaller scales; in any case you can still save and avoid this by using a managed hosting provider)

Indeed, I've run owned bare metal but these days I rent them if I need them but largely VPS's suffice, also feel a lot more confident if something I set up develops a problem since its what you don't know that bites you at 3am.

This seems to be an unpopular opinion on HN, but you are correct. It is possible to generate millions in revenue with 1 or 2 devs. If you manage to do that, paying a higher than average price for AWS is a no brainer.

How much revenue you can generate per developer is totally irrelevant. If you generate millions in revenue but server costs eats it all up, paying a 3x+ premium to run on AWS can easily bankrupt you. By all means, if your server costs are inconsequential to your bottom line, go nuts.

I've just moved a client off EC2 because the premium they were paying would have been a massive problem. The 85% reduction in hosting cost has bought them months of extra runway. Their operational costs related to their hosting also dropped - there's simply been fewer issues to deal with.

I'm sure there are instances where AWS is fine. But there are also plenty of cases where it is a matter of survival to cut those costs.

All good points. I should have been more specific. You can generate > $1M in profit with 1 or 2 devs, and in that case, AWS is a no brainer. In my experience, it is much more difficult to manage dedicated hardware in multiple data centers for high availability with only 1 or 2 devs. The opportunity costs alone in that case can kill you.

But I don't live in a world where runway is a consideration so YMMV. At the time I commented, the parent post was getting downvoted. I've seen that knee jerk reaction on HN multiple times, and that is what prompted my comment.

I know Whatsapp is the poster child for this sort of thinking, but how many other companies generate millions with just a couple of devs?

Origin systems and Id Software did for years, Plenty of Fish had one dev, Minecraft, Stack Overflow, Instagram, Flappy Bird... there have been a lot, and it's probably getting more common in recent years.

It's kind of hard to get numbers though since most private companies don't trumpet their revenue numbers or engineering headcount.

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