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Comment by sdan | Hacker News Reader

Founder of a growing startup:

Started with a cluster of Raspberry Pis and expanded onto an old desktop. Primarily did this for cost (raspberry pis alone were more powerful than a GCP $35/mo instance). Everything was fine until I needed GPUs/handling more traffic than those Raspberrys could handle. So I expanded by including cloud instances in my Docker Swarm cluster (tidbit: Using Traefik and WireGuard)

So half on-prem half in the cloud. Honestly just scared GCP might one day cancel my account and I'll lose all my data unless I meet their demands (has happened in the past) so that half on-prem stores most of the data.

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Honestly just scared GCP might one day cancel my account and I'll lose all my data unless I meet their demands

This hasn't been emphasized enough in these discussions.

Once you're in the cloud, you're dealing with computers as a "utility". Or are you?

When you buy electricity from your local utility, you don't just lose it in the middle of some afternoon for some unknown reason. There's a clear and established procedure, supervised by a Public Utilites Commission. You aren't forced to resort to sending emails and receiving some idiotic canned response from a bot. "Sorry we have reviewed your case and our decision is final. By the way, we don't tell you what you did wrong. Fuck you. Ha. Ha. Ha."

I don't know if Amazon or Azure are better than Google. But I wouldn't trust Google with my worst enemy's data.

> You aren't forced to resort to sending emails and receiving some idiotic canned response from a bot. "Sorry we have reviewed your case and our decision is final. By the way, we don't tell you what you did wrong. Fuck you. Ha. Ha. Ha."

Incidentally, this is exactly what happened to me on my very first attempt with Digital Ocean this year. Just an autoresponder that kept sending the same email with no way to reach a human. And this was just after creating an account and going through an payment authorization process. No money was lost, but I’m not touching a system where humans refuse to get involved.

Edit: To add a comparison on this aspect, Hetzner wanted some verification for a new account and handled it quite well with humans involved (and responsive).

At $35/month though GCP would only have to save you a half an hour of maintenance for it to be worth it though.

Well, given that I am using Docker it doesn't really matter much... but the bigger issue is: GCP in the past has completely blocked access from accounts when they detect random things.

Unless I meet their demands, my entire infra is gone/down for days, which I can't deal with.

You write this as if it's unrealistic. Who spends half an hour or more every month managing each tiny server? The closest server to me right now has probably taken about that long in the past year, swapping out a failed drive that unfortunately wasn't in a hot-swap bay. And it's much more powerful than a $35/month cloud instance.

A half-hour a month seems like a lot of maintenance for a server.

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