Honestly, I think the big cloud companies just haven’t kept up. Their services feel clunky compared to the standalone alternatives. Just try comparing Vercel’s dev experience to Amplify’s, and you’ll see what I mean. On top of that, AWS has gotten way stingier with startup credits.
Put those two together, and it’s no surprise fewer people are hosting their MVPs on AWS. It’s tough to stay under $150/month with a database and a server, while on bare metal you can grab 16 GB RAM for around $20/month.
- Do you think the cloud is actually losing ground? - And for those using bare-metal: how do you handle DB backups, CI/CD, and pulling logs? - Would you scale something using bare-metal servers?
[Carlos](https://github.com/clostao)
As for startup credits, they’re still handing out $100-200k like candy if they deem you a serious startup. There was a lot of abuse in the past so they started putting up filters.
DB can have replicas and upload dumps to some S3 compatible object stores. Like in the cloud. CI/CD with stuff like gitlab and Argo CD is mostly the same. You can install some log monitoring stuff like the classic Elk stack. Or be old fashioned and use ssh and journalctl.
I wouldn’t attempt to automatically scale to the moon on bare metal, that won’t happen. But a few beefy servers running k3s or similar can get you pretty far.
When you get dedicated servers from them, typically it’s VMs on their machines, in their data centers and the hyper scalers have options just like that.
Not interested in arguing a pointless distinction like 'main business'. They apparently do everything, even colo. Want a third of a rack or full? If 'retail' metal is too pricey, try their 'server auction' with older equipment.
I view bare metal as meaning not virtualized.
Another related but not identical dimension is dedicated or shared.
Hetzner offers options in all those dimensions, but not in the price the question mentions.
I don't see how that's too functionally different from having a suite at a commercial office building, save for the fact the power and data isn't going to be nearly as reliable. It's just your "suite" is only a bit more than 19" wide.
Again, incorrect (sorry). $30/m as opposed to $20. Their mistake, I suppose. /s Call it a typo and move on. Rhetorical: how that confuses the question for you, confuses me.
Before we bemoan 'a 50% cost increase', consider: this does quadruple the memory. An additional 48GB on the dedicated non-virtualized box. See: https://www.hetzner.com/sb/
IMO, the $10 on top of $20 is a pittance. Beyond the memory, bonus points: a spare SSD. A small price to reduce administrivia and gain redundancy!
Anyway, pedantry aside, all of this is the question: what does your value judgement look like? You're clearly somewhat familiar with the offerings. Hopefully more-so, now.
While I'm rambling/have the floor, some tangents:
When someone says “on premise” I assume they mean they are running some part of the premise. Whether they are leasing rack space in a broader data center or not, I agree that it’s a continuum, but I’d expect on premise to include negotiating energy and network as part.
To me, the more interesting question for this conversation is a)how are you paying for compute, are you doing long term lease/purchase of servers or are you getting short term provisioning of a standard sku and b) are you using “value added” services. Are you provisioning your own data warehouses, specialized database clusters etc, or are you using a managed service?
The distinction between a vm on a hyper scalar and per hour provisioning of hetzner compute (virtualized or not) seems pretty straightforward and I’d be shocked if there was some mass migration of those workloads away from the big clouds.
I have done workloads where virtualization very much matters and the physical locality of the servers makes a big difference and we are seeing the opposite happen, the cloud providers are dipping their toe in that market which has been closed to them.
The only change is that it's popular to write a "how we saved $$$" blog posts. Which actually could be read as "how we failed to do proper analysis and kept losing $$$ for years".
For solo indie developers, in contrast, it makes more sense to seek out the cost optimal setup straight away.
Indie hackers and small < 10 people startups don't need cloud. However its easier to get moving and scale up and you can just tie in all sorts of other services to make your life easier. If you're on-prem or managing VMs you need to figure out a lot of infrastructure things, networking, security, logging, failover, etc.
Then there is transferring risk. If you host your own infrastructure and you have an outage unrelated to HW or data center, that is entirely on you and to be honest will probably happen more frequently than using cloud. When your cloud provider is down, if its a household name, everyone already knows because everything else they use is probably having issues too. Much easier explanation to customers, they likely won't leave over a cloud outage.
definitely seeing the weaknesses of cloud these days -- it is not a one-stop solution, and the costs are often comically, terribly, absurdly high
otoh, i'm in some regulated industries and being able to get out of dealing with unions and into a regulated-approved cloud situation is very useful for many things.
it's a true hybrid model and it's a challenge, but that challenge is often far, far cheaper than a pure cloud model, and pure cloud is not exactly uncomplicated.
plus like 2/3 of what we do does not need complicated CI/CD pipelines -- most business tasks don't.