Ask HN: Cloud providers are losing in favor of bare-metal?
Lately, I’ve noticed a new trend on X: Devs (and indie hackers in particular) are ditching cloud providers and jumping straight to bare-metal servers like Hetzner.
Honestly, I think the big cloud companies just haven’t kept up. Their services feel clunky compared to the standalone alternatives. Just try comparing Vercel’s dev experience to Amplify’s, and you’ll see what I mean. On top of that, AWS has gotten way stingier with startup credits.
Put those two together, and it’s no surprise fewer people are hosting their MVPs on AWS. It’s tough to stay under $150/month with a database and a server, while on bare metal you can grab 16 GB RAM for around $20/month.
- Do you think the cloud is actually losing ground? - And for those using bare-metal: how do you handle DB backups, CI/CD, and pulling logs? - Would you scale something using bare-metal servers?
[Carlos](https://github.com/clostao)
Given that AWS, Azure and GCP are all recording 20-40% YoY growth, no, I don’t think they’re losing ground.
As for startup credits, they’re still handing out $100-200k like candy if they deem you a serious startup. There was a lot of abuse in the past so they started putting up filters.
I don’t think so. Hetzner sees some growth but they are still very small.
DB can have replicas and upload dumps to some S3 compatible object stores. Like in the cloud. CI/CD with stuff like gitlab and Argo CD is mostly the same. You can install some log monitoring stuff like the classic Elk stack. Or be old fashioned and use ssh and journalctl.
I wouldn’t attempt to automatically scale to the moon on bare metal, that won’t happen. But a few beefy servers running k3s or similar can get you pretty far.
It's just the meme of the year. There's nothing that changed really for quite a long time. Some cloud services provide things on a simplistic and easy way, some in complex and complete ecosystem. The same choice and the tradeoffs have always been there.
The only change is that it's popular to write a "how we saved $$$" blog posts. Which actually could be read as "how we failed to do proper analysis and kept losing $$$ for years".
Interesting that you call hetzner “bare metal”. Most of their product offerings are cloud based VMs (and certainly for $20 a month you are getting shared hardware VMs). Do you think more devs are are actually buying hardware/servers or do you just mean devs are using VMs provided by smaller companies instead of the hyper scalers, when you say “bare metal”.
True, more than bare-metal I meant dedicated servers on-premise
Again that’s a confusing line. Hetzner does not provide (as its main business) “on premise” options as id use that term.
When you get dedicated servers from them, typically it’s VMs on their machines, in their data centers and the hyper scalers have options just like that.
Er, sorry to interject... incorrect: https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/
Not interested in arguing a pointless distinction like 'main business'. They apparently do everything, even colo. Want a third of a rack or full? If 'retail' metal is too pricey, try their 'server auction' with older equipment.
I just want to know what the questioner means is all. I view on-prem as _not_ meaning in the providers data center.
I view bare metal as meaning not virtualized.
Another related but not identical dimension is dedicated or shared.
Hetzner offers options in all those dimensions, but not in the price the question mentions.
$30/m as opposed to $20, their mistake, I suppose. How that confuses the question for you, confuses me.
This does get an additional 48GB of memory on the dedicated non-virtualized box, to be fair.
When you get dedicated servers from them that's exactly what you get: you're renting physical servers, which you manage yourself. And they've been in this business for decades. The VMs offering is much more recent.
They have a cloud product called dedicated as well. I’m not sure what the questioner is arming about. I shouldn’t have said it’s their main business though.
I would say it depends on the effort to cost savings ratio. I moved my most expensive servers there because that’s where it made the most sense. If it totals considerable amounts of money it is absolutely worth the extra effort, but it is not worth it if you only have a handful of t4g.mediums.