Well, this may be a huge regret (kind of already is) but I made the decision to move away from Amazon AWS. There are several reasons why and I know we are not the only ones. With our Amazon software, we pay over $1000/month for our AWS bill and I feel like we are barely doing anything. Its a super small saas business in it’s infancy. Why is it so dang expensive? I made the decision we can do a lot more with less money. Why is this a regret already? Lets dig in.
Lets start with the pros of using a cloud service like AWS. The biggest one in my mind is their engineers and servers. When stuff breaks, they have hundreds of millions in just labor alone. Im sure hundreds of billions in infrastructure. AWS is great when you want to spin up or down new servers. You want to scale horizontally?No problem. Vertically..you can easily do that too. When you are not technical and not a systems administrator, having someone else worry about all that is a blessing. That blessing comes at a cost though. A guy I know currently pays Amazon AWS $12k/month for his software hosting. He can colo his own server and do the same for $150-200.
The cons. ITS EXPENSIVE. Lets think about this for a second. I can have my own servers at a datacenter or I can pay Amazon and use their servers at the datacenter. In the end, a server is a server, a datacenter is a datacenter (ok I know they are not all created equal but close enough). AWS hasnt been absolutely reliable for us. We have actually had more downtime due to AWS outages than with our single website hosted on a server in Dallas for the last 4 years. For our own server, we have not had a single downtime in over 4 years. The same cannot be said with our AWS services. While this goes with price, most EC2 instances are quite small and as things grow, you need to scale horizontally and spin up another server for more resources. When you get to this point, you probably need to use RDS and build in some autoscaling. RDS is even more expensive than using EC2. While a higher quality product, you’re gonna pay for it. Our $1000/month bill at AWS has about 24 vcpu and about 72gb of ram.
What I do that feels maybe like a mistake? Colocate our own hardware and run our own servers. So instead of an ever growing AWS bill, we spent $10k on servers and $1k a month for a colo bill :D. Ok as my two businesses grow (Amazon SAAS and Fix It Today) our bill is only going to go up. But what we bought and our colo bills will give us about 10x the power of what we have at Amazon. While servers and equipment is a capital expenditure, it bites you once upfront. These servers should last us years into the future as we have lots of scalability for our software. The longterm pay off will be huge. We are very small fish but if you want to read a cool article about how Hey.com moved off AWS, they are saving over $1 MILLION a year by using their own equipment. I hope one day Fix it Today will save 10% of what they did each year because of my decision to host our own equipment. Here is the article: https://world.hey.com/dhh/we-have-left-the-cloud-251760fb
So why do I have regret? Simple..Im not a sys admin. I have no clue (ok I have learned a lot recently) about how to manage servers. We are using XCP-NG to virtualize our servers, TrueNAS for storage and backup. Over the past few months as Fix it Today has been building, I have wasted a lot of time and effort learning about networking, the two softwares mentioned above, how to program a Mikrotik switch, Sonicwall OS to protect our network and much more. Its a lot. Im super thankful for my good friend Jesse (also a nurse) but has been doing this stuff on the side for 20 years as a hobby. There is no way I would have considered this without him. We are also paying Vates for XOA and have support from them for any XCP-NG issues. We are also going to have a MSP on retainer for any big issues. While this is a huge headache, I think its absolutely a blast. Something cool about having your own hardware. You probably don’t realize that the internet is actually just huge buildings full of computers. Here is Fix it Today:
