I know it's not in fashion, but I will suggest that renting physical servers is a very good and under-appreciated compromise. As an example, 45€/month gets you a 6-core AMD with 64GB of RAM and NVMe SSDs at Hetzner. That's a lot of computing power!

Virtualized offerings perform significantly worse (see my 2019 experiments: https://jan.rychter.com/enblog/cloud-server-cpu-performance-...) and cost more. The difference is that you can "scale on demand", which I found not to be necessary, at least in my case. And if I do need to scale, I can still do that, it's just that getting new servers takes hours instead of seconds. Well, I don't need to scale in seconds.

In my case, my entire monthly bill for the full production environment and a duplicate staging/standby environment is constant, simple, predictable, very low compared to what I'd need to pay AWS, and I still have a lot of performance headroom to grow.

One thing worth noting is that I treat physical servers just like virtual ones: everything is managed through ansible and I can recreate everything from scratch. In fact, I do use another "devcloud" environment at Digital Ocean, and that one is spun up using terraform, before being passed on to ansible that does the rest of the setup.

phpnode

I really don't understand why the industry seems to have lost sight of this. It's really common to see super complicated, incredibly expensive, but highly scalable cloud deployments for problems that can be trivially solved with one or two dedicated servers. Even the mere suggestion of renting a dedicated server provokes scorn from devops teams. The overall difference in cost when taking into account all of the complexity, feature-lag and general ceremony must be at least 10x and maybe even closer to 100x. It's madness.

jwr

I think one of the reasons is that people confuse physical servers with manual administration. As I said, I do not do manual administration. Nothing ever gets configured on any server by hand. All administration is through ansible.

I only have one ansible setup, and it can work both for virtualized servers and physical ones. No difference. The only difference is that virtualized servers need to be set up with terraform first, and physical ones need to be ordered first and their IPs entered into a configuration file (inventory).

Of course, I am also careful to avoid becoming dependent on many other cloud services. For example, I use VpnCloud (https://github.com/dswd/vpncloud) for communication between the servers. As a side benefit, this also gives me the flexibility to switch to any infrastructure provider at any time.

My main point was that while virtualized offerings do have their uses, there is a (huge) gap between a $10/month hobby VPS and a company with exploding-growth B2C business. Most new businesses actually fall into that gap: you do not expect hockey-stick exponential growth in a profitable B2B SaaS. That's where you should question the usual default choice of "use AWS". I care about my COGS and my margins, so I look at this choice very carefully.