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Comment by papsosouid | Hacker News Reader

Same here. These "amazon is so expensive and so slow" posts show up here constantly, and every time I try to get information on alternatives, and nobody has anything. A single dedicated server running in some warehouse is not a replacement for AWS. I need S3, or I need a bunch of storage devices in multiple datacenters automatically keeping the files I put on them synced. Which hosting provider is doing that again? Where is my EBS with a dedicated server warehouse? I need block device that is durable, and can be quickly and easily detached from one server and attached to another. Even the cheapest redundant iSCSI SAN setup is very expensive.

I am not paying for AWS because I am dumb, I am paying for AWS because they provide services that allow me to outsource the high durability to them. Someone show me an actual alternative please, rather than just repeating "zomghosting.biz gives you a million gigs for $20!!1".

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> I am not paying for AWS because I am dumb

...and the people who criticize AWS aren't dumb, either. AWS brings a lot to the table, and also takes a few things off the table. AWS's scaling and combo of services are both wonderful, but they come at the cost of performance and price.

Most companies don't need "click of a button"-type scaling of instances. And most people don't need all of AWS' services; replacing them with good, stable open-source software alternatives (eg., RabbitMQ for SQS, Riak for Dynamo, Postgres for RDS), while incurring a higher admin cost, is not non-trivial.

My company replaced all of our AWS instances with co-located servers a couple of years ago. Our servers were basically static; we did not rely on any dynamic scaling of instances, and since we are in Europe, we couldn't rely on datacenter distribution, either. The performance difference was extreme. The servers were cheap, but they still blew Amazon out of the water. We could easily afford two 32-core database servers within our budget, and their performance translates to a whole bunch of Amazon's fastest instances.

The up-front hardware costs were less than what we were paying per year to Amazon. We have an entire rack now, and I think we are paying something like $1,500/mo for the entire hosting package. (It may be a little more, but not much.)

Hardware maintenance costs have been negligible so far, and the redundancy built into our infrastructure and stack means we don't have to rush out the door if a box dies on us.

>and the people who criticize AWS aren't dumb, either

I didn't say they were. I asked them to provide an alternative rather than pretending a single dedicated server is comparable to AWS.

>Most companies

I don't care what most companies need. I am not trying to argue, I am asking the people insisting that nobody should ever use amazon to provide a reasonable alternative or stop making sweeping generalizations.

>We could easily afford two 32-core database servers within our budget, and their performance translates to a whole bunch of Amazon's fastest instances.

Did you seriously not notice how you aren't addressing anything I said, but just repeating exactly what I pointed out wasn't relevant? I don't need more cores, I need reliable storage. What is my EBS? Until we're big enough to be running our own datacenters, there's not really a reasonable alternative that I can find. I am asking for advice, not "more cores!".

Cloud Sigma (http://www.cloudsigma.com/) is the best alternative to Amazon I have found. They don't provide services like SQS, but they do have scalable storage.

I suggest you change that aggressive, pouty tone of yours. I was addressing a specific point in your comment, not disagreeing with you.

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