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Comment by erlanger | Hacker News Reader

He mentions all of the overhead of running your own data center, but fails to provide a balanced analysis by omitting the significant expense of running an AWS deployment properly. Just as AWS solves some problems of dedicated servers, it introduces its own challenges which one would not have to consider when running dedicated servers.

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Right, like the fact that an instance can have only one ip address. Virtual hosting for multiple websites with SSL goes right out the window. There are a couple solutions to this problem, but they're either impractical or just plain unacceptable for production boxes. All platform choices have these kinds of gotchas and/or extra costs for things that are just free if you own the server. I use AWS every chance I get, but sometimes a project requirement forces you to go dedicated.

This is easily done with Elastic Load Balancers, simply proxy to different ports for SSL and instruct your webserver to listen there. The huge upside is you can automate this just as well as any other piece.

except you don't have X-Forwarded-For with ELB, which can be a problem, since if you need SSL, there's a good chance you probably also need to be logging IPs for security purposes.

Of course, you can just setup your own load balancer on EC2 with HAProxy and stunnel, but that's a PITA.

Of course, you can just setup your own load balancer on EC2 with HAProxy and stunnel, but that's a PITA.

and PITAs add complexity and cost.Using ELBs is the best solution, but it's a non-issue if you go dedicated.

You don't even need that, and I don't know why he mentioned that as an issue...I was able to flexibly balance with virtual hosts with HAProxy on EC2 like with any other server.

The issues I was considering with la nuebla:

Data is a pain. S3 is great in theory but a pain to integrate. The same goes for EBS, which is really pricey for more than a little. If you can get a good connection on your own and admin a simple file server, serving data is very easy, stable, and cheap.

Amazon's options are prone to serious failure if you do something wrong with them. I don't lose my hard drive's contents when I accidentally pull the plug, but that is the case with EC2.

This is relatively trivial compared to running your own physical server setup (colo or datacenter). Think about where we're at now with EC2: EBS-backed servers are about as easy to manage as a regular VPS, plus they can be regularly snapshotted (every few minutes if you want to) and moved to another datacenter in very little time in the event of an outage.

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