
Ask HN: Does a fledging startup need AWS - ice109
I&#x27;m about to start work on beta release for my startup and trying to decide whether to go with AWS (EC2 instances and RDS) or some other vps (maybe digital ocean or even lightsail). Obviously the reason is to minimize spend - we have runway of about 6 months. For people who&#x27;ve done this: did you eventually migrate to AWS? How painful was the migration?
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amacalac
Things to consider will you need a lot of custom database management? Are you
comfortable deploying MySQL or another DB from command line? Are there tools
in AWS that you will benefit from using - will they save you time compared to
building them yourself, e.g. SQS versus managing a queue system.

If you are prepared to manage these are yourself, feel comfortable doing so,
and your tech stack won't benefit from the AWS tools too much, using a VPS
might be the way to go.

That said you're going for MVP - and you have 6 months to do it. Get going,
move fast and break things!

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ice109
I've done a fair amount of "command line" ops so I'm comfortable with it but
the question what will migration be like when we do move to an iaas?

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amacalac
It depends what your infrastructure consists of. If it's a db with infrequent
writes it's going to be a lot easier to move than a db with a lot of writes.

You could also host on VPS and use parts of AWS e.g. S3 if you require asset
storage, like photos, videos or other files.

Do you have much insight into what your infrastructure will look like at the
start?

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Skywing
Are you suggesting that you have done zero development yet? Develop locally
until you need things to go "live". Don't buy AWS on day one, you won't
utilize it. Save the money. There are many great ways to develop locally, even
with teams. You can go far by utilizing dependency management services, like
npm, etc. You can go far by utilizing local database init scripts, etc, for
consistent dev environments after a fresh repo clone.

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ice109
maybe mvp isn't there right word. we have demos we've developed locally and
we're going to start pilots.

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damm
You should just start with a managed setup; a VPS could work but AWS gives you
an overhead to manage and be aware of.

While your building up; you may switch to AWS once you need more scaling
ability. But if you pick some hosting provider like Internap you can get
hardware pretty fast and will be cheaper in the longrun than any public cloud.

Sad; classic hosting is now trying beat the public cloud. The public cloud is
trying to get everyone on it and kill classic hosting.

It will never die however; because even Amazon needs a datacenter.

