Mostly, headspace. If I run my own server, I just need to apply my existing Ubuntu sysadmin knowledge. If I use AWS, I have to learn a whole load of AWS-specific domain knowledge, starting with their utterly baffling product names. My time is more valuable than that.
Also, sheer cost. Literally everyone I know in my particular part of the industry uses Hetzner boxes. For what I do, it’s orders of magnitude cheaper than AWS.
I agree, I remember when I learned to use Google Cloud for ML training, it took so much time to learn how to setup everything and to go around all their gotchas. I then tried getting started with AWS, but their poor interface and unfamiliar grounds made me stick to using plain VPSs.
We're a small business and hosting costs are killing us. Spending $300+ on a small VM that I can only describe as measly really hurts.
What the heck are you running? Ouch.
When you factor in storage, backups, and all the little support costs, things start to get pricey. Just the db can go from 500gb to a tb. Then all of that data came from somewhere and needs to be stored at least for a while.
Never mind the load balancing. And then we need another server for a different client, and another, and a demo server, and test & staging environments. Ugh. I wish this were on-premmable. We could probably hire an employee for the amount we could save. He'd probably be pulling his hair out supporting it tho. lol
My little on-prem HP dev server's got hundred gigs of ram and 8tb of fast storage. We run a bunch of VMs on there. We paid a couple of thousand dollars for it. And I don't even want to think of what it would cost to ship those VMs to the cloud. Nevermind just how poorly they would perform.
I have recwntly put together a K8S clyster out of old and bargain basement hardware for hosting personal projects. Equivalent perf. from big cloud would cost me $ 400++
Similar situation here but on a bandwidth level. A 1Gbps leased line costs me ~400 bucks a month and is unmetered even if I keep it saturated for the entire month. I don’t even want to imagine the cost of that on a cloud provider.
That’s how you get old, when your time is more valuable than a massive shift in technology.
Nah, we already did mainframes in the 1970s. Renting CPU time only makes sense if you don’t need CPU time or you like wasting money.
Whether some new technology is worth learning and using depends on your circumstances: would you gain more than it would cost? Understanding this isn't about being old, it's about being wise.
It's a common HN fallacy that everyone here is a developer whose main life aim is to remain employable as a developer.
Lots of us are here to ship stuff; to provide viable products that customers will like.
Moving to AWS from Hetzner would not help me ship stuff. Moving to AWS from Hetzner would not result in a better product.