Comments on: Falling from the Sky 2020 Self-Hosting Still Pays

By: Levi Figueira

Levi Figueira — Tue, 02 Aug 2022 14:59:27 +0000

A bit of a necro, I know, but…

The thing that I always see missing from these kinds of estimates are the man-hours put into researching, sourcing, assembling, and deploying the hardware in a colo scenario.

I know most of us enjoy that stuff anyway, but the reality is, in a professional situation, we all tend to go with big name brands for the service and support, and the same thing applies here: with AWS, if an instance fails, you spin up another and YOLO.

One single disaster recovery occurrence in a colo and you’re spending multiples of what you saved by choosing colo in the first place…

By: Ksec

Ksec — Sun, 13 Dec 2020 15:09:50 +0000

I am guessing STH is way more popular that what I expected for those Server Setup. Could those number be published just like StackOverflow [1][2] ( They have grown a lot since then as well ).

And did any point STH thought about actually publishing using something 3rd part apps like WordPress.com instead of good old fashion self hosting? Since STH “seems” to be simple enough for most modern hosted CMS to handle.

[1] https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-architecture-2016-edition/
[2] https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/03/29/stack-overflow-the-hardware-2016-edition/

By: Patrick Kennedy

Patrick Kennedy — Wed, 02 Dec 2020 20:17:52 +0000

Adrian – again, this is for a mature application and is our actual operating expenses, including time spent, not necessarily generalized to every application and adding new ones.

In a broad sense, you are thinking correctly of cloud benefits to developers building something new, but this is about our operating existing infrastructure.

By: Adrian Acala

Adrian Acala — Wed, 02 Dec 2020 17:59:16 +0000

Interesting how the most expensive part of the whole equation was not factored in: employee time. For example, if a developer wants a load balancer in a co-lo, they have to ask the ops team to create one which takes time away from the developer (context switching) as well as the ops who have to context shift as well approve who will at the very least need to execute a script on their end to create the load balancer. At worst, the whole creation step is done manually and highly error-prone.

Now think about the same thing for a server box, a redis server, a database, ElasticSearch, authentication systems, etc. that has to be created by the developer that has been abstracted away by cloud infrastructure. All that developer time costs money but possibly more importantly speed to market.

That’s what cloud provides: the ability to turn the faucet and get water instead of having to build a well and pump your own water.

By: Patrick Kennedy

Patrick Kennedy — Wed, 02 Dec 2020 16:16:49 +0000

In reply to Jim Andreasen. Hi Jim - labor is included which is discussed in both the article and the video. It is a pretty common myth that labor has to be a lot and therefore expensive at the colo/ data center level.

By: Jim Andreasen

Jim Andreasen — Wed, 02 Dec 2020 00:44:42 +0000

There’s no doubt that without the labor, it’s going to be less expensive. I would be very interested if you also took into account at least the labor (still ignoring the opportunity cost of delaying working on solving customers’ problems) all infrastructure work. If you are able to include the labor spent managing cloud and on-prem as a second cost factor, that would tell a more-complete story.