Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Simple, sure, but AWS still charges insane rates.

I can get 60k IOPS on a nanode at $5/mo rate. You actually get a random amount between 20k-60k depending on the type of machine they provision your nanode on.

You want 60k IOPS on AWS? Be prepared to pay like 4-5k/mo. Want multiple systems with it so you can cluster a reasonably performance database? Pay for each and you need to special request the ability to go past 100k IOPS in a region.

Want the privilege of a dedicated vCPU? It's $1500/mo per region just to turn on the feature.

I tried to use AWS just as you mention here and the cost was 100-1000x what it would cost me at akamai cloud or Hetzner. All these fees I was unfamiliar with popped out and the cost was crazy high.

The system I tried to provision was functionally similar to the bottom end dedicated akamai cloud offering and it was going to cost 15-20k/mo instead of $72. Over 200x. And that was just the hourly provisioned rate, not including egress and other bits...



These high costs are Amazon's way of telling you that you aren't architecting for the cloud. In my ~10 years doing cloud infrastrcuture on AWS I've never worked at a company had to purchase dedicated IOPS or vCPU.


Which takes then off the list of providers you can do this with. They could have reasonable prices but they don't.

You couple to AWS with your whole system architecture or you stay away.


If you tell me I need to go 250 miles per hour to get to the grocery store then I guess I have to buy a Bugatti.


Can't carry much in a Bugatti.

It's a real problem if you build on a VPS as your base. I was asked to prep such a system for scale on AWS and choked on the pricing. So we settled for what they offer at reasonable pricing and if further growth is needed, will need to hit eject on AWS and just go elsewhere.

I recommend starting elsewhere and save the migration of you just use EC2.

Most places will let you scale a VPS quite well and there is a logical handoff to your own hardware where you can scale to a system with 512 vCPU and TBs of ram for less than Amazon is charging for step two.


The advantage of the cloud was supposed to be elastic compute, but what this thread is trying to claim is that's not the case.


Or maybe you never worked in certain domains of problems ? Not everything is a web app


A m7gd.medium looks like it would do all that inexpensively.


Not sure about arm, different ISA is a pain.

But the base configuration, for the money, is pretty sad compared to what you get else where. Scaling up is horrendously expensive compared to other providers.

Why would you bother with AWS for this I don't even know. There is no draw to AWS if you are only using EC2. You couple your architecture to their specialized services and go all in and eat the platform risk, and long term cost.

Or... don't even bother with AWS. It makes no sense to use just EC2.




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2026 batch! Applications are open till July 27.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: