←back to thread

Replacing a $3000/mo Heroku bill with a $55/mo server

(disco.cloud)
804 points jryio | 4 comments | 21 Oct 25 20:28 UTC | HN request time: 0.616s | source
Show context
tempest_ ◴[21 Oct 25 20:54 UTC] No.45661573[source]▶
The cloud has made people forget how far you can get with a single machine.

Hosting staging envs in pricey cloud envs seems crazy to me but I understand why you would want to because modern clouds can have a lot of moving parts.

replies(11): >>45661597 #>>45661608 #>>45661636 #>>45661649 #>>45661714 #>>45661726 #>>45661756 #>>45661835 #>>45662162 #>>45662794 #>>45663024 #
1. jeroenhd ◴[21 Oct 25 21:11 UTC] No.45661756[source]▶
Teaching a whole bunch of developers some cloud basics and having a few cloud people around is relatively cheap for quite a while. Plus, having test/staging/prod on similar configurations will help catch mistakes earlier. None of that "localstack runs just fine but it turns out Amazon SES isn't available in region antartica-east-1". Then, eventually, you pay a couple people's wages extra in cloud bills, and leaving the cloud becomes profitable.

Cloud isn't worth it until suddenly it is because you can't deploy your own servers fast enough, and then it's worth it until it exceeds the price of a solid infrastructure team and hardware. There's a curve to how much you're saving by throwing everything in the cloud.

replies(2): >>45661949 #>>45663039 #
2. nine_k ◴[21 Oct 25 21:28 UTC] No.45661949[source]▶
Deploying to your private cloud requires basically the same skills. Containers, k8s or whatnot, S3, etc. Operating a large DB on bare metal is different from using a managed DB like Aurora, bit for developers, the difference is hardly visible.
3. matt-p ◴[21 Oct 25 23:21 UTC] No.45663039[source]▶
RDS/managed database is extremely nice I will admit, otherwise I agree. Similarly s3, if you're going to do object storage, then running minio or whatever locally is probably not cheaper overall than R2 or similar.
replies(1): >>45668943 #
4. objektif ◴[22 Oct 25 13:35 UTC] No.45668943[source]▶
I would never ever go back to hosting own DB. It is just a maintenance nightmare.