Hector Martin

Someone asked me why I didn't put my personal web server on AWS instead of on Hetzner. Because on AWS it would be 10x more expensive for the same specs. The cloud makes *no* sense for personal 24x7 "it just does its thing" long-term workloads.

The cheapest dedicated servers go for €15-€25/mo. €25 on Hetzner gets you a 4C8T Xeon, 16GB RAM, 2x3TB HDD, unlimited traffic €25 on AWS gets you 1C2T, 2GB RAM, 200GB storage, 1GB out/mo before they start charging extra

The cloud's great if you're a company with money to burn, or need hourly/minutely pricing, or dynamic scaling, or just want to use all those managed services they offer and not have to deal with admining them.

But if you just want "a Linux box for a pile of personal projects/sites that just sits there and works"? You're throwing money away if you spin up a cloud instance, unless your resource usage is small enough that you get into a pricing tier below the cheapest dedicated servers.

And if you're doing more than one thing you're better off with a single large server rather than multiple small instances, plus unless you're all-in on containers/"let other people configure my stuff" (which only works for a subset of things) it means more boxes to admin.

If you need better reliability in case of hardware failure, and you know what you're doing, you're still better off just renting two servers and doing DRBD and floating an IP or something like that, depending on what services you run.

Heck even at three servers and a Pacemaker cluster (so you can do quorum) you're still doing it cheaper, and then you get some experience with HA platforms :-) (of course, that also takes more time to set up and admin)