If the average Web engineer's salary capable of running a site like this is ~$180,000, then a $30,000 difference in cost is only about 2 months salary. Learning and dealing with a new hosting environment can easily exceed that.

[–] fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What's that? Taxes? And no way do I agree with this. $30k is a lot, no matter how much you make. Learning a new environment is not THAT hard.

[–] masterspace@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago

It is, but learning a new environment, then dealing with any down the line troubleshooting or instability can easily add up to $30,000 if you actually track where salaried employees time is going.

[–] virtualbriefcase@lemm.ee 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That, and like others mentioned their flexibility, plus the fact that they're fairly reliable (maybe less than some good Iaas providers but a fair bit more than your consumer vps places). Moments ago I went to the hetzner site to check them out and got:

Status Code 504 Gateway Timeout

The upstream server failed to send a request in the time allowed by the server. If you are the Administrator of the Upstream, check your server logs for errors.

Annoying if it's you nextloud instance down for a minutes, but a worthy trade off if you're paying 1/4 of the price. Extremely costly for big business or even risking peoples's lives for a few different very important systems.

[–] barsoap@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

Hetzner has four nines availability, usually higher. AWS claims five nines but chances are you'll mess up something on your end and end up at three to two nines, anyway. If you really need five nines you should probably colocate and only use the likes of AWS as a spike backup.

And I guess "messed something up on your end" happened in that case: I don't think Hetzner is necessarily in the habit of maximising availability of their homepage at all cost (as opposed to the hosting infrastructure), you probably caught them in a middle of pushing a new version.

...speaking of spike backups: That is what AWS is actually good for. Quickly spinning up stuff and shutting it down again before it eats all your money.

[–] pomodoro_longbreak@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

I'm not a server admin, but I am a dev, and for many of us it's just what we know because it's what our employers use. So sadly, when it comes to setting up infrastructure on our own time, the path of least resistance is just to use what we're already used to.

Personally I'm off AWS now though, but it definitely took some extra work (which was worth it, to be clear).