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Comment by ordinaryperson | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. Like anything, right tool for the right job.

I was hosting my personal website on EC2 with an RDS instance and it cost around $20/month. But since the site gets little-to-no traffic and I got sick of EC2 upkeep, I switched S3 & Cloudfront: now my bill is $0.80/month.

Another example: at work we inherited an old EC2 instance that was set up solely to run cron jobs on other servers. Occasionally it would lock up or go down, for whatever reason, creating chaos for the servers that needed specific jobs run frequently.

We switched to AWS Lambda functions for those cron jobs and they've never failed once.

If you're running a games website that gets pinged 24/7, don't use Serverless. But the notion that it's slow and overpriced is misguided if you're applying the wrong use case.

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I wonder if it's a generational thing but it seems to me that people nowadays have forgotten that you can host more than one site or database per server. Failing that shared hosting still offers amazing value if you don't need anything to weird e.g. someone like Bluehost or Hostgator offers unlimited* sites + databases for about $5/month

>you can host more than one site or database per server

I'm fully aware of this but never do it because I'm pretty much incompetent as a sysadmin. I don't want to be in a position where I can break an existing project while trying to configure something new I don't understand yet. Nor do I want to run security updates for a blog I setup 5 years ago.

I'm not 100% thrilled with going serverless because it makes debugging awful, but it has saved me money and it makes most things easier. If I went back to shared hosting, I'd just be paying for the privilege of getting to shoot myself in the foot.

I host a site on S3, CloudFront, and Lambda and I'm always looking at the billing to see when it's time to graduate to a normal server setup. It's not going to be a huge project to switch from the existing setup to a docker style setup on one server. So, I'm keeping the site on S3 until it becomes favorable to move it.

Since the organization only has the one site, there's not enough usage to warrant $5 a month for even a tiny a virtual server.

I have a t2.micro that runs several things:

- Mumble server for my wife's WoW guild (They don't use Discord because some of their peeps are running on really dated hardware that can barely handle WoW, let alone an Electron app running concurrently with WoW)

- Taiga.io task tracker

- Dev server for a web game I'm working on (If I ever decide the game is good enough to publish, obviously I'd run dev and prod servers on separate instances)

- IRC bouncer

- Pi-hole DNS for my phone

Containers? Don't need 'em. And each process requires next to no CPU time, so I always have nearly full CPU credits. RAM is enough unless I'm building the latest version of my IRC bouncer, but hitting the paging file for a few minutes is no big deal.

I can also vouch for this. I run a low traffic website on S3 and Coudfront. And Lambda is perfect for handling the small amount of dynamic content or form processing that it requires. It costs cents a month to run and doesn't need any maintenance.

How did you replace a site that needed rds with s3? Was it a blog that you moved to Jekyll or something?

If you are comfortable with React, look at GatsbyJS. It is pretty amazing what you can build into a static site.

most likely either Jekyll or Gatsby

S3 is just slower but in theory you can do everything you can with rds.

So e.g. if the queries you are making aren't time sensitive or are easily cached switching to s3 can be okay.

They may have used S3 Select: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/s3-glacier-select/

Some tools are't the right one for any jobs we actually have.

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