How much time and money do you pay for hosting monthly?
I am working on a book on how to use AWS to save costs + optimize for performance and scalability.
I am wondering if anyone of you would be interested in the book?
What is one pain problem that stops you from using AWS?
For me, it's hard to justify using AWS when I can get set up on Heroku in less than a minute.
I'm currently paying $50 per month for two "servers" (dynos) and $28 per month for my databases (Postgres and Redis). I imagine I could drop that down to $20 or $30 per month if I moved to AWS. But saving $30 per month isn't worth the time and effort of manually maintaining a server.
It might not be worth for now but in long term it is definitely worth. You can focus more on other aspects than maintaining servers to improve your product.
Frankly, most of the projects, sites and ideas I've seen on IH + Product Hunt don't need aws'es and other fancy setups, basic shared hosting on Siteground (with SSD) would work just fine for 97%+ of devs here.
Even for MVP and "just to check" ideas most of the people are going through the technologies not necessary for the job to be done, losing time on setups instead of doing proper marketing or idea validation, surveys, group testing etc.
I am making sites and developing scripts every day since 2011 and I still don't need to see anything more than php, html5, css (bootstrap) and standard databases on shared hosting.
I spend about $12 a month for AWS. However, the product is still just recently launched and don't have a lot of users.
The time I spend is just to initially set things up. After that, I try to automate most things. Maybe that has amounted to 10 hours or something for the past 3 months.
To me AWS has an intimidation factor. I get the general impression I have is that it takes an above average level of skill to really take advantage of what AWS has to offer.
I prefer something like firebase which is, or tries to be, the one stop batteries included solution for a project. If there’s something i need that it can’t offer I can always deal with those instances case by case.
Yes by using firebase for my project I lose some control and it will probably be more costly at scale. But if one of my projects ever reaches scale then I’ll probably have more time or money to help address that issue then.
TLDR: seems complex and as a solo dev I prefer something like firebase for my side projects.
Aws is very fast paced platform and your concept is good but it might deprecate for on going changes in services and corresponding prices.
Also are you considering the pricing factor based on regular account? If yes, then you might also need to look into vendor contracts pricing since most of the enterprises have vendor contracts and their pricing model might be different.
AWS is very expensive. I’m running few crypto exchanges for my customers and every exchange cost over $1500 per month. At least half of this cost is storage for blockchain nodes and compute power for nodes themselves. The other half is processing capacity to handle few millions requests per day.
This may sound like not much for “millions requests” but my software is heavily optimized. I can definitely bring total hardware fees down by a factor of 3 with Hetzner or maybe Digital Ocean.
Key AWS selling point is excellent support for terraform, multiple data centers across the globe. But others catch up quickly so I’m thinking of migrating to a cheaper hardware provider.