

Will cloud services always remain a bad deal? - Tichy

Just wondering, so far all cloud services are more expensive than the classic alternatives. For example I just bought a subscription to WeeWar. It costs 24$ for 24 months. I almost could have bought "Empire Deluxe" for that price and keep it forever, no recurring fees required.<p>Many of the other services look affordable if you look at them isolated - blogging, wikis, issue trackers, versioning systems and what not, they all seem to start from 10$/month. However, if you need all of them, you are already at 50$/month just for the ones I listed. Buying a vServer and just installing them oneself suddenly seems competitive (administration costs money, but that might get easier, too - in fact it is not that bad in the end).<p>As for the generic clouds, none of them seem to offer affordable RAM. I can see how it works if you pass on the costs to your client (add EC2 costs for one instance per client to basic cost of your service). But for me I must admit I see services like Heroku or App Engine mainly as cheap prototyping platforms for now. If traffic would get serious, I expect I would be looking into more affordable solutions.<p>What do you think? Obviously the price will come down as hardware becomes cheaper, but I don't see how anything could be done against the subscription fees. Why do I have to pay 50$/month just to get 3GB of RAM in my server (didn't look actual numbers, but RAM is out of my price range atm)? That is some very expensive RAM...
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cmelbye
Yeah, the price of Software as a Service. It might seem low while you're
looking at their pricing page, but it really can add up over the months. If
you can find cheaper alternatives that you can run on your own server, go for
it. You'll be dealing with scaling, fixing servers that go down, etc, but it
might be worth it.

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Tichy
Thinking it over, I suppose the problem really only applies to small fish
clients. Big companies probably don't care that they pay 600$/year for 2GB of
RAM.

