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

(disco.cloud)
804 points jryio | 3 comments | 21 Oct 25 20:28 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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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.

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adgjlsfhk1 ◴[21 Oct 25 22:57 UTC] No.45662794[source]▶
also how far you can get with a single machine has changed massively in the past 15 years. 15 years ago a (really beefy) single machine meant 8 cores with 256GB ram and a couple TB of storage. Now a single machine can be 256 cores on 8TB of ram and a PB of storage.
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layoric ◴[21 Oct 25 23:02 UTC] No.45662854[source]▶
Exactly, and the performance of consumer tech is wildly faster. Eg, a Ryzen 5825U mini pc with 16GB memory is ~$250USD with 512GB nvme. That thing will outperform of 14 core Xeon from ~2016 on multicore workloads and absolutely thrash it in single thread. Yes lack of ECC is not good for any serious workload, but great for lower environments/testing/prototyping, and it sips power at ~50W full tilt.
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1. eru ◴[22 Oct 25 00:24 UTC] No.45663550[source]▶
Curiously, RAM sizes haven't gone up much for consumer tech.

As an example: my Macbook Pro from 2015 had 16 GiB RAM, and that's what my MacBook Air from 2025 also has.

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2. ericd ◴[22 Oct 25 01:43 UTC] No.45664038[source]▶
Ehhh Macbook Pros can be configured with up to 128 now, iirc 16 was the max back then. But I guess the baseline hasn't moved as much.
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3. eru ◴[22 Oct 25 04:23 UTC] No.45664862[source]▶
Yes, there has been some movement. But even an 8 fold increase (128/16) over a decade is nothing compared to what we used to see in the past.

Oh, and the new machine has unified RAM. The old machine had a bit of extra RAM in the GPU that I'm not counting here.

As far as I can tell, the new RAM is a lot faster. That counts for something. And presumably also uses less power.