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Comment by solotronics | Hacker News Reader

For someone who is interested and capable the costs are an order of magnitude lower for self hosting. Your right for the most part small business would be better off using an existing cloud, they dont have the skillset to properly design and manage something like this themselves.

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Even with the skill sets, i am not sure the costs are lower in most cases, depending on where you are your uplink costs can be substantial, you might have a asymmetric link or your ToS with the ISP may forbid any hosting services or just poor internet speeds. Without a leased line ISPs are not going to give a uptime SLA or a ring topology for redundancy etc, Reliability is expensive, there are enough cheap k8s/VPS providers at sub $50 month (For ex Digital Ocean).

You are right about rate limited internet. Something else to consider is renting some rack space is super cheap and can come with free internet and electricity. Last time I checked a few years ago in DFW it was $60 a month with 1Gb/s and some IP addresses for 1RU.

Many small and medium businesses have a "business" ISP circuit. This typically doesn't have caps and has the option of a dedicated IP. Speaking from experience I was an ISP network engineer for a big telco years ago.

Does that cost estimation include the 4-6 devops freelancers you're going to need for like 6 months to get it going? The bigger cost is in staffing than cloud bills unless you're running really a lot of infra..

If you need 4-6 devops people to run infra from the ground up you're doing it wrong. I've seen 4 man devops/ops teams run thousands of machines at scale.

Unless you're talking about a huge magnitude of infra (which you'd have a budget for) then I think your 4-6 number is a little off.

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