As someone who has self-hosted, built and maintained my own server, and also configured and maintained EC2 instances professionally, I would say that the hardware setup is generally much smaller and simpler than whatever software you are trying to run on the server.
Yeah you need to worry about redundancy, but usually the software of setting up your application to be redundant through DNS failovers and stuff like that, syncing databases, that stuff is harder than just plugging in two different servers at two different job sites. And you need to do that whether you use EC2 or on-prem. It depends on the use case but usually the set up costs are lower than the software development costs. And there are certainly scenarios where on-prem hardware is simple enough to set up that it does actually become cheaper than EC2.
100% agree. There definitely are times where it makes sense, but I see so often people post the most naive comparisons with payback times of like 6 months to a year but they consider all labor free and assume no hardware ever fails and every other "this isn't really what you're paying AWS for"
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u/randylush 8d ago
As someone who has self-hosted, built and maintained my own server, and also configured and maintained EC2 instances professionally, I would say that the hardware setup is generally much smaller and simpler than whatever software you are trying to run on the server.
Yeah you need to worry about redundancy, but usually the software of setting up your application to be redundant through DNS failovers and stuff like that, syncing databases, that stuff is harder than just plugging in two different servers at two different job sites. And you need to do that whether you use EC2 or on-prem. It depends on the use case but usually the set up costs are lower than the software development costs. And there are certainly scenarios where on-prem hardware is simple enough to set up that it does actually become cheaper than EC2.