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Comment by galaxyLogic | Hacker News Reader

This all seems quite complicated. Wouldn't it be easier to use Amazon Lambda or similar service. Spend your time creating and optimizing the applications instead of the infrastructure.

I've known people who built their own boat and also built the engine for the boat. And it's a great hobby which gives you a great sense of accomplishment. But, if you just need to get some fishing done, buy the boat with the engine already installed.

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I also self-host my own site and some smaller web-services. It's a pain and I don't like it, but the costs are low and predictable and I don't have to write for any proprietary API like Lambda

Personally, I would never use Lambda for a passion project. The uncontrollable pricing model is not friendly for individual developers. What do you do if you wake up in the morning to a $1000 bill? Leave it up and just keep pouring money down the drain or just end up rewriting the whole site to custom infrastructure so you can control the spending anyways?

Lambda has it's own set of complexities and concerns. It's also not a good fit for his use cases.

Now, a containerization service like Fargate would fit his use case better since he is using containers.

However, cloud services come with their own complexities and the principle problem they solve (horizontal scaling) doesn't apply to his sites.

Uhmmm...but then why go fishing when you can go to the supermarket?

maybe the goal is to develop the skills and experience to be able to build more boats. or to work on marine diesel engines. or to do something like rehabilitate gigantic 70 year old wooden tugboats.

you can't always rely on third party things to host your stuff if your intention is to become the person who runs the hosting services for other peoples' stuff. same way you can't rely on a boatyard's contractors to maintain your boat if your goal is to become an engineer for medium sized yachts.

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