
Ask HN: Why some startups are using AWS? - anovikov
Or essentially: why someone who presumably knows what he&#x27;s doing, is using AWS? I understand why the clueless do, because it&#x27;s so convenient and Amazon marketing power is so strong - i had clients who had no concept of a dedicated server in their heads: for them it was either AWS&#x2F;GCP&#x2F;Azure, or buying a server and putting in their office - Amazon pushed other alternatives out of their brains with their marketing power - but the startup founders should still understand?<p>With AWS or any cloud you overpay 5x-100x. Why anyone rational would do it?
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byoung2
You pay a premium for flexibility. If you need a single dev server today and
it is 50-50 that you will either need 100 servers next year or 3, then AWS or
another cloud provider is the logical choice. AWS reserved instances can also
give you a discount that makes the price competitive with regular dedicated
servers. Note that you can also request a dedicated host on AWS EC2 and have a
server reserved just for you.

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hindsightbias
What startup knows how to install, maintain and support infrastructure 24x7?

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anovikov
See, it might make sense not hiring a sysadmin who will work on your physical
servers in the datacenter if it's about paying $500 to AWS monthly vs $100 to
the datacenter - coz the salary is say $5000 a month. But if the startup plans
to stay on that level forever, they better not even start. And pretty soon
you'll find yourself paying $20000 per month (very practical thing in a still
small startup i know) vs $4000, turning situation around - and going off cloud
while being live may be a painful transition.

(yes you get discounts on large volumes in the cloud, but so do you in the
datacenters - you can for example rent whole rack which is a lot cheaper than
doing it per-server).

