I think you might want to rename the post to: "Why the cloud isn't for my startup"
Seriously, people need to stop telling other people what to do. I very appreciate your input and in fact, I am exactly in that situation, but when you tell me what to do, it's less likely I am listening closely to what you say.
On topic: Sure I could learn how to do sysadmin stuff. But for some people and maybe me, the opportunity costs outweight the economic benefits of rolling out without PaaS
Yeah its different for all cases. Our monitoring company uses a bunch of providers, we started with AWS. Why? Because its cheap, quick to deploy...and i had no way of getting our servers in 8 global locations in a week any other way.
We spend under 1k / month (still - we're the masters of money saving...) and we're all around the globe. The truth is, we couldnt even get close to matching this price any other way.
The cloud is for a lot of startups, but only if you know how to use it properly.
Besides a lot of profiling of our code, its amazing how many people dont ever do this...we rely heavily on micros in production.
A lot of people will tell you using micros in production is a bad idea, and dont get me wrong...for most people it is a bad idea. Our findings are that micros are reliable and if you use them correctly you are going to be OK.
Where we used to have 2 smalls, we can afford around 8 micros before the cost becomes an issue. This is a significant benefit in that it increases our availability (Basically we're in each region and every availability zone). We have two main systems, the web frontend and our monitoring nodes. Nodes exist in a specific region, and report back to the central storage system via API.
The main feature of our platform which enables us to scale using such small systems is that our CPU demand is very predictable. There are no "hourly jobs" or anything that would spike CPU, everything is done throughout the hour and if we need more work to get done, we simply add more servers.
We are going to do a big write up on this in a few weeks, check our blog (http://www.verelo.com/blog) or HN for the post when it comes out.
All these things are great cautionary pieces. The point is to ignore them when they don't apply. When I see "Why the cloud isn't for your startup" I read it as "Why the cloud might not be for your startup." It's stuff worth thinking about and using if it is helpful.
"Sure I could learn how to do sysadmin stuff. But for some people and maybe me, the opportunity costs outweight the economic benefits"
You're exactly right. Sure, sysadmin stuff isn't hard. But it does take time to learn. Additionally, over time you learn things from experience when things go wrong. And when things go wrong without experience you will be scrambling to even know where to start to get things back up again.
As anyone will tell you that has been doing this for many years (I have) you learn new things every day. Just like a Doctor does and a lawyer does. (Even though both of those professions think they know it all out of school, they don't.)
Or perhaps it should be renamed, "Why the cloud IS for your startup."
This explains how it's cheaper to deploy on metal for high traffic sites, as if $1000/month in server costs in the event that my site gets massive traffic matters.
With Heroku, I can have a site up and running in minutes with zero sysadmin work and almost no monthly cost. Should my site get hammered, I'm happy to pay $1000, heck $3000 per month, for a few months should it be necessary to handle traffic until I get my act together to reduce costs on dedicated servers. At that price, you can be damn sure you get good support from Heroku.
Compare that to spending a large portion, or even a small portion, of energy and time that could be dedicated to building your product before you even know if you'll get traction - I'll take the cloud any day.
If sysadmin work is so easy to learn, or to farm out with money, it can wait until I need it.
Seriously, people need to stop telling other people what to do. I very appreciate your input and in fact, I am exactly in that situation, but when you tell me what to do, it's less likely I am listening closely to what you say.
On topic: Sure I could learn how to do sysadmin stuff. But for some people and maybe me, the opportunity costs outweight the economic benefits of rolling out without PaaS