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Ask HN: Why some startups are using AWS?

1 points by anovikov ↗ HN
Or essentially: why someone who presumably knows what he's doing, is using AWS? I understand why the clueless do, because it's so convenient and Amazon marketing power is so strong - i had clients who had no concept of a dedicated server in their heads: for them it was either AWS/GCP/Azure, or buying a server and putting in their office - Amazon pushed other alternatives out of their brains with their marketing power - but the startup founders should still understand?

With AWS or any cloud you overpay 5x-100x. Why anyone rational would do it?

3 comments

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byoung2
You pay a premium for flexibility. If you need a single dev server today and it is 50-50 that you will either need 100 servers next year or 3, then AWS or another cloud provider is the logical choice. AWS reserved instances can also give you a discount that makes the price competitive with regular dedicated servers. Note that you can also request a dedicated host on AWS EC2 and have a server reserved just for you.
hindsightbias
What startup knows how to install, maintain and support infrastructure 24x7?
anovikov
See, it might make sense not hiring a sysadmin who will work on your physical servers in the datacenter if it's about paying $500 to AWS monthly vs $100 to the datacenter - coz the salary is say $5000 a month. But if the startup plans to stay on that level forever, they better not even start. And pretty soon you'll find yourself paying $20000 per month (very practical thing in a still small startup i know) vs $4000, turning situation around - and going off cloud while being live may be a painful transition.

(yes you get discounts on large volumes in the cloud, but so do you in the datacenters - you can for example rent whole rack which is a lot cheaper than doing it per-server).