Comment by cldellow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cldellow | Hacker News Reader

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They act as a go-between in that they ultimately host on AWS/GCP. They host their own infrastructure in that they appear to run Kubernetes and have built out their own deployment and service fabric, so they're just using the underlying machines as dumb compute, they're not, eg, building on RDS.

In March 2021, someone asked a question about carbon emissions of their data centres. They said they hosted on both GCP and AWS, but mentioned they were interested in moving to their own bare metal [1].

In April 2021, I asked a question about egress fees to Google, and they walked back a bit the comment about moving to bare metal [2].

As of March 2022, they're still in AWS/GCP [3].

As of September 2022, workloads for new users deploy into AWS, even in regions that were previously served by GCP [4].

[1]: https://community.render.com/t/does-render-use-green-energy/...

[2]: https://community.render.com/t/is-render-com-hosted-in-googl...

[3]: https://community.render.com/t/are-your-servers-owned-by-you...

[4]: https://community.render.com/t/which-render-regions-map-to-w...

(Render founder) We're still on public clouds because even if it doesn't help with margins, it helps us move faster on features our customers want. It's all one big prioritization problem (and lots of little ones too!).

I'm curious how significant a risk products like AWS Lightsail are to your business - it seems you are competing in the same market, but:

1. They have vastly different ongoing capital and cashflow requirements than you do.

2. They have all the leverage when it comes to the question of your continued operations on their cloud.

I'm also curious if they have already offered to just buy you out since you're clearly succeeding where they seem to just be treading water. (But not expecting you to answer this question. :) )

> how significant a risk products like AWS Lightsail are to your business - it seems you are competing in the same market

Not Anurag, but as ex-Stripe himself, he may appreciate AWS Flexible Payment Service vs. Stripe parallels here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34513430

Once you've built a system that works well in production (and scales elastically, too, it seems), it is really difficult to switch out the underlying infrastructure. Makes sense about walking it back.

The problem with running your own servers in data centers as a startup is that elasticity is genuinely a difficult problem to solve if you don't have a large budget for unused compute, storage, and so on. As we are seeing in Fly.io's case.

Ultimately, my bet is that both startups end up as Heroku-like acquisitions for some large cloud company or another. I think that render will sell for a lot more because the value it provides is agnostic to the underlying cloud infrastructure.

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