
Ask HN: Do you use any tools to save your cloud cost? - magacloud
AWS is a 10 billion$ business and Azure is the closest competition. Often, I hear from prospects that their negligence, lack of discipline to carefully manage their resources result in 30% more cloud cost. There are tons of tools helping you to optimize and save you cloud cost. Do you use any or what are you doing int his regard?
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QuinnyPig
I consult specifically around this problem.

There is no silver bullet tooling answer; it's a more complex problem than
most folks think.

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magacloud
thanks. should not we approach this problem in two steps: 1) Use tools (like
ActOnCloud (which i founded few years ago), CloudCheckr, Cloudyn and etc.,) to
automatically fix low-hanging fruits and put a governance layer around your
cloud usage 2) then, Consult.

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mattbgates
I tend to "buy in bulk" to save money on everything. It's a blessing and a
curse: a blessing because I save a lot of money over the long-term, but a
curse because I have to spend more upfront. This goes for everything from my
grocery shopping to my shopping online.

So to save costs online...

I use DreamObjects from DreamHost. It is pretty much AWS but with DH branding.
I registered for it when it first came out and was considered "beta" and
nabbed a deal where I have 2¢/GB of storage up to 1TB of data. But their other
plans aren't bad at all.

At one point I had DreamPress for $16 a month, which was their optimized
WordPress hosting, which normally costs $19.95 a month, but I managed to grab
that in beta as well. Eventually, I let this go and moved my websites over to
the Cloud.

When I first signed up for DreamHost, I purchased their "Happy Hosting"
(Shared Hosting) plan for 10 years which puts my hosting costs at $5.95 a
month. Then I just charge my clients that price and it has paid for itself. As
far as cloud costs go... DreamHost also released an amazing product called
DreamCompute, which gives me cloud computing @ 512 MB for $4.50 or 1 GB for
$6.00, with a 80 GB of storage space and 100 GB storage block. Free bandwidth
for the time being.

Affiliate link if interested:
[http://www.dreamhost.com/r.cgi?1405127](http://www.dreamhost.com/r.cgi?1405127)

I have gotten some great deals... but have missed out on a lot too. I had
gotten AWS once and hosted my website there and somehow managed to wrack up so
much on an invoice that I pretty much emailed Amazon and told them to give me
a refund because... for a website that wasn't active, bots slammed it, and I
was being charged for the bandwidth. Luckily, they refunded the entire price.
So I've just found a better solution and savings with DreamHost.

My average costs per month, not counting the Shared Hosting that I already
pre-paid for, are about $8-$10 a month for hosting my images on DreamHost's
AWS (DreamObjects) and my websites now on DreamHost's Cloud Servers
(DreamCompute). I've never really had any "surprise" charges on my invoice
like I did just giving AWS a trial run. Definitely recommend.

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magacloud
Thanks Mattbgates. Dreamhost is new to me. Will checkout.

Are there reasons why you did not consider other cost-effective clouds likes
Google, DigitalOcean or Exoscale and etc.?

