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Is Azure leading the hosting market?
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Is Azure leading the hosting market?

LampardLampard Member, Patron Provider

Hello guys,

So i have got into lot of discussions that Azure is leading the hosting market, in few years every thing will be replaced by Azure, the hosting companies we have right now will not exist after years and people will be only using Azure. Actually i have been hearing this all the time and i do not believe with that yet i agree that Azure has its own quality but an individual would never pay so much money for their servers, even in this time some companies don't even want to pay that much, by using a price calculator of Azure i just calculated 1.5 GB RAM, around 100 GB SSD with 1 TB Bandwidth for $150/month.

Not only that, but paying extra dollars for SINGLE email account, around $5/month for 1 month. Here in this market people pay $5/year and are having more than 10+ email accounts.

What do you guys think about it?

So i am looking for serious answers please

Comments

  • They've been saying that http://www.panix.com is overpriced too, but after 30 years they are still going strong.

  • williewillie Member

    Azure is competitive with AWS but is not in the LET market at all. It would be great to have an M128-64ms with LET pricing but it isn't going to happen in the foreseeable. M128-64ms has 128 vcores and 4TB of ram (yes that says 4 terabytes of ram with a T), for $27 an hour. I'll wait.

    Thanked by 1PrestigeWS
  • vovlervovler Member
    edited June 2018

    @willie said:
    Azure is competitive with AWS but is not in the LET market at all. It would be great to have an M128-64ms with LET pricing but it isn't going to happen in the foreseeable. M128-64ms has 128 vcores and 4TB of ram (yes that says 4 terabytes of ram with a T), for $27 an hour. I'll wait.

    $19440 per month...

    or about 4 of these from nocix (if they ever are in stock)

  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

    You guys who complain about Azure pricing (which is extremely similar to AWS pricing, so you can consider them the same price really) are missing the point.

    Yeah, for the guy who wants to run cpanel/WHM, AWS/Azure isn't the place. Ditto for your vanity email domain and your minecraft server and your Plex node and your seedbox.

    For the startup that wants to run 1,000 nodes, spin them up/down, provisions new stuff daily, depends heavily on automation, on the other hand...

    Depends really what you mean by "hosting". Hosting Reddit or Github or Netflix on lashed-together dedis would be insane. On the other hand, hosting a personal tentacle hentai fetish blog on AWS would also likely be insane.

  • Well the market for azure is very different than your average VPS provider.

    Currently contracted by Microsoft to deploy mediawiki on Azure appservice for linux for a client. One hour of my time is the same as your 1.5gb - 100gb SSD - 1TB BW config. So in the end development, overhead etc. are much bigger costs than the azure bill.

    Thanked by 2Lampard Aidan
  • williewillie Member

    raindog308 said: Hosting Reddit or Github or Netflix on lashed-together dedis would be insane.

    I don't know what lashed-together dedis mean, but of course self-hosting is cheaper than something like AWS, and for a big enough site, there's a crossover point when the expense of cloud hosting outweighs the ops/admin cost of running your own servers. Iirc Dropbox moved from AWS to self-hosting a few years ago and claims to be saving millions by doing that. I worked at a place that had about 3000 colo machines (I imagine that as roughly the size of github, or far smaller than reddit) and had a couple of full time staff looking after them: AWS would have cost orders of magnitude more.

    Reddit was in the news lately for surpassing Facebook in web audience size by Alexa reports. I think that number may be bogus since most Facebook users are on FB's mobile app and don't show up in Alexa, but either way it's huge. Facebook of course operates humongous data centers like Google does. Reddit is probably big enough to think of doing the same.

    Wikipedia as well seems to operate mostly using colo gear for the public facing site, but I think they do some data prep stuff on Hetzner dedis.

    Startup companies live by speed of execution and burning money on AWS to ship stuff faster can be of benefit. At a certain point though if the company wants to make a profit, income has to exceed outgo. So once growth has started to stabilize, you have to pay attention expenses, and AWS (or Azure or whatever) becomes a questionable luxury.

    Thanked by 1Lampard
  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

    willie said: I don't know what lashed-together dedis mean, but of course self-hosting is cheaper than something like AWS, and for a big enough site, there's a crossover point when the expense of cloud hosting outweighs the ops/admin cost of running your own servers. Iirc Dropbox moved from AWS to self-hosting a few years ago and claims to be saving millions by doing that. I worked at a place that had about 3000 colo machines (I imagine that as roughly the size of github, or far smaller than reddit) and had a couple of full time staff looking after them: AWS would have cost orders of magnitude more.

    OTOH, Netflix is still on AWS and Github runs on Azure. It all depends...there are some really valid use cases for cloud.

    willie said: Startup companies live by speed of execution and burning money on AWS to ship stuff faster can be of benefit. At a certain point though if the company wants to make a profit, income has to exceed outgo. So once growth has started to stabilize, you have to pay attention expenses, and AWS (or Azure or whatever) becomes a questionable luxury.

    But it's not always like that. For example, in some companies you can walk into the DC and say "these servers are for customer A, these are for customer B, etc." When customer B goes away, their servers goes away. This is actually a really common model in some industries. It might be cheaper to warehouse capacity or it might be better to say "oh, we won a contract in Asia, our stuff will work better if we put them in an AWS DC near them" and of course everything in between.

    At a smaller level, there are companies that sell you software for $X a month and it's just easier to package it on AWS/Azure because the underlying infra costs are passed through.

    There's also a certain percentage of CIOs who simply do not want to deal with infrastructure. This ranges from "I don't want to own DCs" all the way to all-in on the cloud where the entire infrastructure was built with API calls.

    In general, you're right - beyond a certain point it's cheaper to run your own. Coincidentally, I was just reading about SNAP's "hobbling cost structure" (public cloud):

    https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/05/30/will-snap-ever-turn-a-profit.aspx

  • FHRFHR Member, Host Rep

    @raindog308 said:
    For the startup that wants to run 1,000 nodes, spin them up/down, provisions new stuff daily, depends heavily on automation, on the other hand...

    Depends really what you mean by "hosting". Hosting Reddit or Github or Netflix on lashed-together dedis would be insane. On the other hand, hosting a personal tentacle hentai fetish blog on AWS would also likely be insane.

    Slightly off topic, but I just wanted to mention that "Hybrid cloud" is a thing. Have cheap dedicated servers for your base load and then add on-demand instances on AWS, Azure, OVH etc...
    For somewhat predictable loads this is awesome, as you can bring down the costs while still keeping good scalability

    Thanked by 1vimalware
  • mkshmksh Member
    edited June 2018

    @Lampard said:
    So i have got into lot of discussions that Azure is leading the hosting market, in few years every thing will be replaced by Azure, the hosting companies we have right now will not exist after years and people will be only using Azure.

    I am not going into the pros and cons of stuff like Azure but let me tell you i can envision your conversation partners pretty vividly. The most bold claims usually come from people which cling to the hope of their spot knowledge not only staying relevant but actually becoming the answer to everything. Notice how those guys advocate Azure but not cloud technology in general? Well, they likely know Azure and that's it so Azure is the one to rule them all... Listening to much to those guys is a waste of time. Don't do it. Those circles also love echo chambers so don't be surprised if they manage to summon a ton of people supporting their narrow views and cite a ton of bullshit praising their object of worship.

  • Gotta spend money to make money.

  • nielsniels Member

    @raindog308 said:
    OTOH, Netflix is still on AWS and Github runs on Azure. It all depends...there are some really valid use cases for cloud.

    Github operates its own datacenters afaik. And Netflix only runs a relatively small part on AWS ("the best way to express it is that everything you see on Netflix up until the play button is on AWS, the actual video is delivered through our CDN").

  • Yup but some rich and big players of market will go with leading hosting providers.

  • YuraYura Member

    There is no "the hosting market". There are many hosting markets.

    Personally, I don't care who is dominating the premium segment. Same as I have no interest to know which of the summer hosts gets more sign-ups in a week before running away the money.

    Why do you care? Out of leisure?

    Thanked by 1angstrom
  • AidanAidan Member

    raindog308 said: OTOH, Netflix is still on AWS and Github runs on Azure. It all depends...there are some really valid use cases for cloud.

    I'm pretty sure that they don't pay the same rates as us plebs.

  • jarjar Patron Provider, Top Host, Veteran
    edited June 2018

    The only way you drive everyone to Azure (or anyone else) is to internationally regulate the industry until the only people not regulated live in places where electricity is a luxury, meanwhile you give tax incentives to Microsoft.

    It could happen at least in some countries, in pockets. In the US we've done it to several industries. We're trying to do it to the vape market, for example, to uphold the tobacco companies. Same economic theory could be applied to most else.

  • huntercophuntercop Member
    edited June 2018

    no, just no

  • mrtzmrtz Member

    @mksh said:
    I am not going into the pros and cons of stuff like Azure but let me tell you i can envision your conversation partners pretty vividly. The most bold claims usually come from people which cling to the hope of their spot knowledge not only staying relevant but actually becoming the answer to everything. Notice how those guys advocate Azure but not cloud technology in general? Well, they likely know Azure and that's it so Azure is the one to rule them all... Listening to much to those guys is a waste of time. Don't do it. Those circles also love echo chambers so don't be surprised if they manage to summon a ton of people supporting their narrow views and cite a ton of bullshit praising their object of worship.

    Correct me if I'm wrong here @mksh, but doesn't this go both ways?

    Anyway, it's different use cases. And remember, just because you leverage Azure/AWS/GCP for certain services, doesn't mean it's ALL OR NOTHING CLOUD NO EXCEPTIONS FUCK EVERYTHING ELSE. You can get the best of both worlds, you know ;)

  • RizRiz Member

    From what I'm seeing, Azure is taking over a fair share of the "enterprise" cloud business in the US.

  • mkshmksh Member
    edited June 2018

    @mrtz said:

    @mksh said:
    I am not going into the pros and cons of stuff like Azure but let me tell you i can envision your conversation partners pretty vividly. The most bold claims usually come from people which cling to the hope of their spot knowledge not only staying relevant but actually becoming the answer to everything. Notice how those guys advocate Azure but not cloud technology in general? Well, they likely know Azure and that's it so Azure is the one to rule them all... Listening to much to those guys is a waste of time. Don't do it. Those circles also love echo chambers so don't be surprised if they manage to summon a ton of people supporting their narrow views and cite a ton of bullshit praising their object of worship.

    Correct me if I'm wrong here @mksh, but doesn't this go both ways?

    Anyway, it's different use cases. And remember, just because you leverage Azure/AWS/GCP for certain services, doesn't mean it's ALL OR NOTHING CLOUD NO EXCEPTIONS FUCK EVERYTHING ELSE. You can get the best of both worlds, you know ;)

    I think you should reread what OP and i have written. For the record: I didn't even take any position on all of this. I was merely characterizing the type of person OP was likely dealing with. Also your statement is light years away from what OP or i am describing so i don't see how you even think this relates to you.

  • Where are you reading this? The latest Gartner report shows AWS, followed by Azure followed by Google in terms of the 'magic quadrant' for cloud services. AWS have been steaming ahead for years. This is commercial cloud solutions for big buisness and big data, think a national bank, or government organization. Yes, we see these companies going to the cloud more and more often. The cost savings for overhead, maintenance and initial server costs farrrr outweigh the negatives of not having the server power button infront of them.

    However, solutions such as Digital Ocean, Linode, OVH have their own spin on this, and are far cheaper. You're not just paying for hardware with Azure, you're paying for the support and expertise behind it. Whereas you could go for a cheap & cheeful 512mb box for $5/yr or something, get no support and may have some outages, but does it matter if it's just your personal mail or website?

    Pick the right service for you, and above all, don't put all your eggs in one basket. Still make physical backups and still continue to evaluate your requirements and make sure your provider is able to keep up with any growth / expansion plans.

  • mrtzmrtz Member

    @mksh said:

    You are correct! I read your post a bit too fast and took you as one of the narrowminded people you were describing - my bad!

    Statement was, as you probably figured, not directed at you but a general comment. However, only takes visiting a few threads here and there to see it ain’t light years away from some of the meanings that goes around here ;)

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