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I feel like this is the wrong way to look at it.

A better way IMO is: don't scale prematurely.

Build things as you need them. In the vast majority of cases, even CDNs are an unnecessary cost (presuming you're not paying the exorbitant cloud provider bandwidth tax). If you start to see performance issues, then deal with it as needed.

And if your workhorse suddenly grows that coveted single horn?

That's a problem you want to have!

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Seconded. Start with a single box. You're not Facebook. The success of your startup won't depend on whether you have an unplanned downtime of 15 minutes once a month during your first year. If your product is any good people will retry after an hour and not switch to your competitor. If you hit scalability issues go for a hybrid model where you make the resource intensive part scalable.

But hey if you think you need to start out with webscale, have two dozen micro services and an exploding number of failure states between them and blow through your VC money with an AWS bill before the first customer signs up, more power to you.

Or maybe 2004 Facebook which ran on a single box.

>Mark hosted Facebook (it was theFacebook.com back then) from his own computer in his Harvard dorm room. You can buy a domain name and point it to any static IP address. That's how we did things back then because we have fewer options for hosting services that didn't cost an absurd amount for a college student.

>Eventually, Facebook was hosted in a shared datacenter in California,..(off Quora)

The “problem” I have is Digital Ocean gives me a bunch of conveniences like CDN, CI, HA, Git Deploys for $5 a month. Thats where I start. Running my own metal is a later problem not a now one. By the time $1m AWS bill vs. big fat box is the choice, I’m not reading blog posts to decide. I am running tests.

That does not in any way negate my point. Where you start depends on cost/benefit. Personally, I'm liable to start in AWS, actually. That doesn't mean I'll use every high-dollar service they offer, though.

At a second glance yes probably it aligns with your point, or at least is anecdotal for it.

$40 a month on a dedicated box will cover you for your first million users.

No you aren't running tests because you will be locked in to aws and your cloud computing bills will eventually bankrupt you.

$40 a month and $400 of my time a month, that is the issue. At some point the lines meet and it is worth the time to save a $10000 DO bill for hight traffic I am sure. But that is a later problem.

It's a later problem you can't solve! You cheaped out in the short term and will face ludicrous long term costs.

And not just you, it's a core part of cloud computing's monetization model.

Additionally, if anything goes wrong with your Digital Ocean account, Digital Ocean will not help you. So you are running a high risk.

DO runs your app pretty much as is with few modifications. Think npx next init; git commit; git push; so it ain’t hard to migrate. You end up doing the same stuff you would have done on day 1.

So in essence, you want to use cloud providers UNTIL you need to scale? Isn’t that the opposite way round? Doesn’t it make it sound ridiculous, seeing as though the cloud providers were meant to help you scale?

Hard to answer in absolutes. Depends on use case.

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