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Carolina Cloud – One third the cost of AWS for data science workloads (carolinacloud.io)

142 points by bojangleslover ↗ HN
We're Carolina Cloud - managed data science infrastructure at ~1/3 the cost of AWS.

I left my job earlier this year after watching companies get crushed by cloud bills for workloads that didn't need hyperscaler complexity. Some examples from my previous life: - $1k/month for a basic 16 vCPU VM - $50k/month for a high-RAM instance - Over $1k/month for notebook platform start-stop execution

We built Carolina Cloud for data scientists and small teams who need serious compute without the sticker shock. Our sweet spot: if you're running VMs, notebooks, or RStudio and not deeply tied to AWS/Azure/GCP service ecosystems, we can save you a lot of money.

What we offer: - Standard Ubuntu VMs - One-click Marimo notebooks - One-click RStudio Server and Shiny hosting - S3-compatible object storage (launching soon) - Prepay discounts for commitments as short as 2 weeks - SOC2-certified, HIPAA-compliant datacenter in Charlotte, NC

Simple pricing: $0.005/vCPU/hr, $0.005/GiB RAM/hr, and $0.0001/GiB of hot storage/hr on AMD EPYC Turin processors. A 32 vCPU, 128GB RAM instance runs ~$240/month vs $800+ on AWS.

We're not trying to replicate every AWS service - if you need Lambda + Secrets Manager + S3 with pre-signed URLs, stick with AWS. But if you're a hedge fund running backtests, a biotech team analyzing genomics data, or a researcher who just needs a beefy VM without surprise egress fees, we're 1/3 the price.

Check us out at console.carolinacloud.io - happy to answer questions about our infrastructure, pricing, or why we think there's room for regional clouds built on owned hardware.

23 comments

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brudgers
we're 1/3 the price

How will you provide high quality service and reliability while competing on price with the scale and financial might of AWS?

Because in B2B, those things tend to have a higher value than initial cost. Or to put it another way, your customers will be making long term investments by choosing you.

Successfully competing on price in a commodity market requires cheaper access to resources and because price is the easiest way to segment a market, low prices attract price sensitive customers...they are the least desirable customers. Good luck.

bojangleslover
You are right for probably 60% of customers. For someone spending $3k/mo on cloud on a company doing $500k/yr of revenue then going down to $1k/mo on cloud for a less tried and true product (us) is likely a bad idea.

Similarly for a mom-and-pop bakery (contrived example) hosting a website for $60/mo, going down to $20/mo (just to keep the 1/3 ratio) also is probably not worth it.

But some of our customers are not like that. For example a hedge fund we have been working with needs 512G RAM and 256 vCPUs for a mortgage model. The data size is not too big and once they get their results they rip it back to on-prem. The complexity is low, ie they just ssh in and do their models. Often they let them run over the weekend.

And these guys are very price-sensitive. In their industry, saving money means more carry for partners and bigger bonuses for quants. These guys are counting nickels.

So I think you're totally right for the large part of the market that we're not really for, and we're not really competing for those types of customers. But we're not really providing much managed service, we're providing a commodity that, assuming you don't need the high-complexity ecosystem surrounding it, can be very nice for customers who are price-sensitive.

jammo
Have you found any customers who are too price sensitive for you? Presumably at some point it is cheaper to go and rent bare metal.
handfuloflight
I'll bite. How much capacity do you have or some examples of the capacity you're managing?
cyberax
Nice! I'm definitely going to try you for our testing infrastructure.
Lucasoato
If you’re looking for a cheap but reliable alternative, Hetzner offers i7 64GB Ram servers for as low as 37.45€/month.

Of course you’re not in AWS, forget about all the managed services, but we’re talking about 95%~98% cheaper egress costs, with 20TB included in most machines.

leetrout
I looked around for reasonable datacenter colo in the triad and triangle and didn't get anything promising. Where are you physically hosting your infra?

Curious if you are having to buy bandwidth as well. Some of the Midwest data centers include over 30TB of bandwidth in the rack rentals.

And if you are willing to go into the details curious how you are handling bare metal provisioning. MaaS or home grown tooling? Or are you just installing proxmox by hand?

tcdent
Can I attach multiple GPUs to a container?
tianqi
I'm very interested in your product. However, I'd like to report a strange phenomenon: whenever I open your website's homepage, although it doesn't seem to use a lot of memory, my Chrome becomes extremely laggy, and afterwards my entire Mac OS becomes very slow. The first time I encountered this, I couldn't determine the cause. I closed all applications and rebooted my computer. After working perfectly for a while, I reopened your website, and my Chrome and OS became almost unresponsive. After rebooting my computer again, without opening any other applications, just Chrome and your website, and it immediately became nearly unresponsive again. Therefore, while I'm not entirely sure, it seems highly related to your website.
tomhow
We’ve removed the Show HN designation for now because it’s not clear that this is something people can play with without paying anything.

If it is possible/easy, please indicate in a reply to me, and we can update the title and post.

Of course it’s still fine to be on the front page of HN if the community finds it interesting. But Show HN is meant to be about showcasing an interesting project you’ve built (with a focus on technology discovery) rather than announcing a product people can buy.

6r17
Something is really really off with the website I would suggest a remake of the front-end as unfortunately it seems to miss the mark. The product seems genuinely valuable so don't get lost in that crazy background thing - focus on what information should be delivered - outline the important stuff - rn it broke my browser and it feels like you don't have the right focus. I closed it and just don't want to be bothered engaging more with it otherwise than writing this stinky commentary unrelated to what you actually deliver. Keep up the great work it seems you have done the most !
mindcrime
> Carolina Cloud

> Charlotte, NC

> bojangleslover

Username checks out!

Seriously though, this looks really cool. And I'm always happy to see other NC folks representing on HN.

I could see using your service for some stuff, so who knows, we may be sending some business your way. It wouldn't be much (for now), but hey...

Thaxll
Not sure what's going on with the landing page but it's CPU / GPU heavy.
amhoab
This is a huge market and there are lots of competitors out there. Just FYI that 1/3 of the AWS price isn't really considered cheap when you look at the budget market. Some of the cheap European providers have US presence now as well. That said, the pricing isn't too bad and the lineup looks good. Also, the website also gives me issues on my Android phone.
0xbadcafebee
"one third the cost of AWS" is just AWS with savings plans enabled

> if you're [...] a researcher who just needs a beefy VM without surprise egress fees, we're 1/3 the price

The AWS egress fee is $0.08/GB, whereas Hetzner has $0.00/GB. So, why pay $0.0225/GB?

These companies are the worst kind of scam. If you could really provide a product on par with the big boys but somehow lower than commodity prices, you'd corner the entire hosting/cloud market. But you can't, because they already made things hyper-efficient.

It's like trying to sell someone a $5 hamburger by advertising that some other restaurant sells a $15 hamburger. It turns out that other restaurant also sells a $5 hamburger, it's just not at the top of the menu, because cheap isn't always a sales leader.

ilaksh
The console page is showing third party login failure on my phone after I tried to switch to desktop mode because I couldn't see the create instance form. Also the wrbgl stuff on the home page crashes my Android browser after a few minutes.
Imustaskforhelp
What service are you using to run your cloud on top of? Do you have your own hardware (which I feel is unlikely) or are you using any other cloud provider to build on top of

I was interested in building my own cloud (which had a specific niche) and the biggest issues which happened for me personally were that most companies had the issues that if you wanted to create your own cloud on top of, you were responsible for the abuse from your clients and they can shutdown your account if threats persisted/It wasn't really clear for many companies so I was always somewhat worried about it, so I am curious as to how you are dealing with it or what your thoughts are on this matter.

kjfarm
Love that it is in NC! Though, I'm confused who this is for. Is it for genomics data scientists mainly or is it general compute (I would also compare with hetzner and the other clouds if you are going the general compute method). If genomics or data scientists is the main audience, is this going to grow to be more collab notebook plug and play? Very cool and wish you the best!
statskier
I’m confused about what the licensing situation is that allows you to provide RStudio Server instances. Does Posit allow third parties to do that?