Hetzner launches three new dedicated servers
tl;dr Mini rant (pro dedicated, anti-cloud)<p>Amazon has done an amazing job of convincing people that their hosting choice is between cloud (aka, AWS) or the higher-risk, knowledge intensive, self-hosting (aka, colocation). You see this play out all the time in HN comments. CTOs make expensive and expansive decisions believing these are the only two options. AWS has been so good at this, that for CEOs and some younger devops and developers, it isn&#x27;t even a binary choice anymore, there&#x27;s only cloud.<p>Do yourself, your career, and your employer a favor, and at least be aware of a few things.<p>First, there are various types of hosting, each with their own risk and costs, strength and weaknesses. The option that cloud vendors don&#x27;t want you to know about are dedicated servers (which Hetzner is a major provider of). Like cloud vendors, dedicated server vendors are responsible for the hardware and the network. (If you go deeper than say, EC2, then I&#x27;ll admit cloud vendors do take more of the responsibility (e.g. failing over your database)).<p>Second, there isn&#x27;t nearly enough public information to tell for sure, but cloud plays a relatively minor role in world-wide server hosting. Relative to other players, AWS _is_ big (biggest? not sure). But relative to the entire industry? Low single-digit %, if that. The industry is fragmented, there are thousands of players, offering different solutions at different scales.<p>For general purpose computing&#x2F;servers, cloud has two serious drawbacks: price and performance. When people mention that cloud has a lower TCO, they&#x27;re almost always comparing it to colocation and ignoring (or aren&#x27;t aware of) the other options.<p>Performance is tricky because it overlaps with scalability. But the raw performance of an indivisible task matters a lot. If you can do something in 1ms on option A and 100ms on option B, but B can scale better (but possibly not linearly), your default should not be option B (especially if option A is also cheaper).<p>The only place I&#x27;ve seen cloud servers be a clear win is GPUs.