> I find it hard to believe that the knowledge to manage a bunch of dedicated servers is that arcane that people wouldn't choose it for this kind of gigantic saving.

Managing servers is fine. Managing servers well is hard for the average person. Many hand-rolled hosting setups I've encountered includes fun gems such as:

- undocumented config drift.

- one unit of availability (downtime required for offline upgrades, resizing or maintenance)

- very out of date OS/libraries (usually due to the first two issues)

- generally awful security configurations. The easiest configuration being open ports for SSH and/or database connections, which probably have passwords (if they didn't you'd immediately be pwned)

Cloud architecture might be annoying and complex for many use-cases, but if you've ever been the person who had to pick up someone else's "pet" and start making changes or just maintaining it you'll know why the it can be nice to have cloud arch put some of their constraints on how infra is provisioned and be willing to pay for it.

In some sense I'm starting to think it has more to do with accounting. Hardware, datacenters and software licenses (unless it's a subscription, which is probably is these days) are capital expenses, cloud is an operation expense. Management in a lot of companies hates capital expenditures, presumable because it forces long term thinking, i.e. three to five years for server hardware. Better to go the cloud route and have "room for manoeuvrability". I worked for a company that would hire consultants, because "you can fire those at two weeks notice, with no severance". Sure, but they've been here for five years now, at twice the cost of actual staff. Companies like that also loves the cloud.

Whether or not cloud is viable for a company is very individual. It's very hard to pin point a size or a use case that will always make cloud the "correct" choice.

Right... That's why the hire "AWS Certified specialist ninja"

I get the feeling that with LLMs in the mix, in-house server management can do a lot more than it used to.

This is way way more expensive than hetzner. Not even comparable?

What images are you running that you'd need the latest version up after just a minute?

One annoyance (I don't know if they've since fixed it) was that Docker Hub would count pulls that don't contain an update towards the rate limit. That ultimately prompted me to switch to alternate repositories.

You just use docker.

It is like 4 lines of config for Postgres, the only line you need to change is on which path Postgres should store the data.

Hetzner was raved about before AI was cool. I know since based on those good reviews I moved half of my apps from DigitalOcean to Hetzner. My DigitalOcean droplet was lacking in RAM and it was more expensive for me to grow it than move some stuff to another small VPS on Hetzner.

Well, you gotta take all that into consideration before your build out.

You can use block storage if data matters to you.

Many services do not need to care about data reliability or can use multiple nodes, network storage or many other HA setups.

Isn't this nature of every dedicated server? You also take on the hardware management burden - that's why they can be insanely cheap.

But there is middleground in form of VPS, where hardware is managed by the provider. It's still way way cheaper than some cloud magic service.

There are several things going on even now, 1 hour after your comment. But I appreciate that they list them. That hopefully means that they have a good culture of honesty, and they can improve.

If you have millions of users, you absolutely need to have someone whose whole job is managing infrastructure. Expecting servers or cloud services to not crap out on you without someone with the skills and time to keep things running seems foolish.