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May 2019
10:42am, 16 May 2019
8,044 posts
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cathrobinson
I’m intrigued by the comments about AWS starting cheap and then getting very expensive....? I know they (we - I do work for them) actually lower costs for customers as AWS scales and can get more bang for buck. And reliability of the big cloud providers is obviously second to none. Is it worth at least exploring?
(I can’t get you mates rates, I’m afraid... )
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May 2019
11:13am, 16 May 2019
1,097 posts
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oumaumau
I think it depends how 'bursty' and elastic your setup is Cath - obviously if a physical server is busy, then the tasks just take more time and there is an appreciable delay in processing/output. If you have a burstable (?) compute service, then tasks can be more timely, but costs become variable depending on requirements.
I've never known a customer (20 years in enterprise IT) that fully understood their needs until they weren't met...
Don't mean to teach you about eggs, apologies if I did 
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May 2019
11:19am, 16 May 2019
7,516 posts
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larkim
Presumably AWS's sales pitches though can model pricing based on logs from existing server setups?
I'd imagine as a "one man band" Fetch is interested in stability and security of costs, especially as his income is subject to the whims of users. If there's an 80% chance of a cloud virtual environment reducing costs, but a 20% chance that costs would increase (even if the up time / response time etc was better as a consequence) that might be too big a risk to personal livelihood / family etc.
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May 2019
11:23am, 16 May 2019
936 posts
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um
Cath - my comment was meant in the same way. Not meant as derogatory, but in the sense of clients spending more than initially anticipated through add-ons, extras and variable costs. A bit like going into a shop for milk and coming out spending far more on the special offers seen.
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May 2019
11:24am, 16 May 2019
28 posts
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mph.run
Do you actually need a full physical server to host the website, could you run the platform on PaaS, either AWS/Azure or Google?
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May 2019
11:25am, 16 May 2019
1,098 posts
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oumaumau
I think of it slightly differently larkim. For instance I rarely open the map tab in the training log - mostly 'cos it takes ages to churn the data. If it didn't (as there was an elastic amount of compute power to do the lifting) I'd probably look at it more often, and so be a more expensive customer...
Not that I'm accusing fetch of underspecc'ing the service or anything.
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May 2019
11:35am, 16 May 2019
31,395 posts
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HappyG(rrr)
Cath, not trying to denigrate the AWS / Azure model at all, just as others have said that my understanding is that it's harder to control. With flexbility of performance comes flex in cost! And I don't think Fetch would want that! The benefit of having a fixed server is that costs are fixed. If things get hungry then the server struggles but at least there's no additional charge.
mph. same answer but the other way round. I think 12 years ago a physical server was all that Fetch could buy. Now it's more about reliability of cost than necessarily because it's the only offering. What we're trying to hunt down is a hosting service offering with fixed and as low costs as today, but with hopefully a slightly more resilient platform, which something like PaaS or virtual server environment might offer. But as long as it's not at a cost premium!
When I first came across RAID for servers (90s?) the idea was that one large, reliable disk was an expensive disk. Or two expensive servers with a disk each and complex failover between them. Storage costs were coming down so having a stack (2 or more) of disks that were themselves relatively cheaper would give you resilience, but at lower total cost. Hence Inexpensive. But I have been around a long time, so it may be an ancient history thing! G
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May 2019
12:17pm, 16 May 2019
8,045 posts
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cathrobinson
Back when ‘big disks’ were 4Gb, eh G? I was an IT engineer in the 90s
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May 2019
1:20pm, 16 May 2019
7,522 posts
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larkim
Our Uni computers had big discs in the shared computing rooms - 40MB HDDs compared to the 20MB in the ones in my hall of residence. Always amusing to see the IT technicians backing up each PC to a stack of 3.5inch floppy discs!
Agree with oumaumau - there is definitely something in that lure of faster loading pages that might encourage additional use; doubly a good reason why Fetch goes for fixed capacity! Having said that, I don't think there is any area of the site that I don't use or steer clear of because of slow performance - it all works at the right pace for me.
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May 2019
1:41pm, 16 May 2019
937 posts
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um
Changing into the over-50s thread ... I started out making rude messages on punched tape (6th form) and progressed to running/writing interactive 'ERP' systems on those 20 & 40MB disks (1970s) - with a cpu measured in kb and each user running in an 8k partition for program and local data.
Anyway - fixed costs as stated - because anything 'free at the point of use' drives exponential demand.
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