A million-dollar engineering problem
I&#x27;ve always been set aback by how much AWS servers cost. Maybe I&#x27;m just too cheap but you can go to very reputable hosting companies and get things at fractions of the price.<p>For example, if I need 16GB of memory and 4 cores here are my options:<p><pre><code>    * AWS (t2.xlarge) $137.62
    * OVH (EG-16)     $79
    * So You Start&#x2F;OVH (SYS-IP-1S) $42
    * Kimsufi&#x2F;OVH (KS-3B) $29
    * Hetzner (EX41) €46.41 [Lowest cost model is 32GB of ram]
    * Joe&#x27;s Data Center (No model name) $45 [Duel socketed L5420 which is 8 cores]
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That&#x27;s a crazy price difference and, unlike frmo what I understand about AWS, you don&#x27;t need to pay for bandwith for most of these companies or they have some crazy high limit. IIRC it&#x27;s common for 20TB to be the standard (FREE) bandwith limit. You&#x27;re also on real hardware, not a VM.<p>Unfortunately not all of these are perfect systems. There are issues with them. Some have slower CPUs, some have slower disks, some are in other countries but you can just pick the ones that suit your need for whatever you have to run. You can also use VMs that are far cheaper then these dedicated systems. If your workload is under 50% duty cycle on a CPU and under 4GB of memory you don&#x27;t need a dedicated server. Buy a VM from one of these companies:<p><pre><code>    * RamNode (8GB SVZS) $28 [Fully SSD storage, very fast network]
    * OVH (VPS CLOUD RAM 2) $22.39 [12GB(!) of ram and 2 vCores]
    * Linode (Linode 4GB) $20
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These are all VPSs but they will get the job done and are cheap enough that you can build something great on a budget.<p>This is just from a few minutes of remembering when I had to buy my own hardware. I&#x27;m sure this isn&#x27;t an exhaustive list. You can usually find information on the web hosting talk forums and on a site called low end box. I don&#x27;t have links on hand but they&#x27;re worth a read.