A big part of the cost of hosted servers is that the hardware is maintained by someone else and is located in a proper datacenter with (hopefully) fast and redundant internet links. Because they’re geared towards production services, not “lab”/staging/test/dev environments.
However, the hourly billing that “cloud” providers offer can be useful for these environments – If you have short, rare tasks (builds, experiments) that need expensive hardware.
Let’s say I want to compile WebKit for aarch64 every two weeks, and I want the build to be done quickly, so I need a dual ThunderX box. I could either spend a couple thousand $$$ upfront, or pay $0.1 per hour for a spot instance on Packet, which comes out to $0.2/month if the build finishes in under an hour.
@arrdem, you’ve got an issue with your power calculations and/or units. Watts are units for measuring instantaneous power and Watt*hours are power over a given time. So “8kw per day” doesn’t make much sense. You might just have kW and kWh switched, I didn’t look close at the numbers. Might be why things aren’t making sense.
@azdle, yeah that checks out. The numbers clearly didn’t work when I tried to do the dimensional analysis this morning, I think the mistake comes down to me recalling kwh = w/h whereas kwh = w * h which is why I went and ballparked off of PG&E’s power analytics.
I do! This site (and others) are built on Jekyll. The theme I use is a copy of the Hyde theme I’ve hacked up over the last several years. The color scheme and logo were made with https://logojoy.com
It clearly heavily depends on what you need to do but UpCloud $5/mo instances work well with lots of smallish projects/websites.
I really doubt many people would need such a big configuration for a single node and even so you might need it just temporarily (so rent it for X hours/days and then turn it off) or you might be better off getting many smaller and cheap instances to get some sweet load balancing with them.
I’d get a on-site setup only for very specific projects and you’ll know when that’s the case, otherwise economy of scale wins (and less hassle overall).
A big part of the cost of hosted servers is that the hardware is maintained by someone else and is located in a proper datacenter with (hopefully) fast and redundant internet links. Because they’re geared towards production services, not “lab”/staging/test/dev environments.
However, the hourly billing that “cloud” providers offer can be useful for these environments – If you have short, rare tasks (builds, experiments) that need expensive hardware.
Let’s say I want to compile WebKit for aarch64 every two weeks, and I want the build to be done quickly, so I need a dual ThunderX box. I could either spend a couple thousand $$$ upfront, or pay $0.1 per hour for a spot instance on Packet, which comes out to $0.2/month if the build finishes in under an hour.
@arrdem, you’ve got an issue with your power calculations and/or units. Watts are units for measuring instantaneous power and Watt*hours are power over a given time. So “8kw per day” doesn’t make much sense. You might just have kW and kWh switched, I didn’t look close at the numbers. Might be why things aren’t making sense.
@azdle, yeah that checks out. The numbers clearly didn’t work when I tried to do the dimensional analysis this morning, I think the mistake comes down to me recalling
kwh = w/hwhereaskwh = w * hwhich is why I went and ballparked off of PG&E’s power analytics.You might want to resize those images - you are using full size 4048x3036 images as thumbnails (which aren’t clickable anyway).
@arrdem, can I ask if you use a static site generator / template for your site? If so, which one? I really like the design…
I do! This site (and others) are built on Jekyll. The theme I use is a copy of the Hyde theme I’ve hacked up over the last several years. The color scheme and logo were made with https://logojoy.com
It clearly heavily depends on what you need to do but UpCloud $5/mo instances work well with lots of smallish projects/websites.
I really doubt many people would need such a big configuration for a single node and even so you might need it just temporarily (so rent it for X hours/days and then turn it off) or you might be better off getting many smaller and cheap instances to get some sweet load balancing with them.
I’d get a on-site setup only for very specific projects and you’ll know when that’s the case, otherwise economy of scale wins (and less hassle overall).
Another part of the hidden cost is replacing failing hardware as well.