Why I Stopped Self-Hosting

0:00 - Why I stopped self-hosting
5:00 - Why another company started self-hosting
9:23 - Why Netflix went all in on AWS

#neetcode #leetcode #python

[mosti]

I personally think the title should be "Why I stopped self-managing my cloud hosting" since in both of your case it is hosted on the cloud, just managed differently. The points you made I mostly agree with though.

[Bryan-egsi]

This sounds more like managed vs unmanaged services

[jaketus]

Haven't ever heard somebody call VM from public provider as self-hosting, since you literally aren't self-hosting.

[mikeykme]

I think an important point is that Netflix isn’t using AWS for a majority of their video content being transferred to users. From older posts they were putting things closer to the user by working with ISPs directly to help out the congestion issues.

Clickbait title, I don't even think you can call this self-hosting since you don't even host the things, they are hosted on cloud although you manage them.

[HumanoidTyphoon]

My understanding of the scaling of DHH's company is that it's a B2B company where signing large contracts take time and it's easy to plan for more compute power for new large clients, and small clients joining doesn't make much of a difference from the server's point of view.

[kishankokal]

why not use docker containerised deployments with github actions???

[enzocrespillo]

It sounds like you probably set up the server with quite a bit of technical debt, which is understandable given the short time it took you to set it up initially (those 8 hours). You could have taken the opportunity to learn how to properly set up the server so that subsequent changes would be less significant. Anyway, what I'm getting at is that this doesn't seem to be a problem with self-hosting per se, but rather with inexperience.

[lolikpof]

Just use docker for development, and deploy in docker to production. No hassle, no problems

[tanchwa]

"I needed to install those python dépendances, that took a couple hours"

Bruh, you're using someone else's tool and you aren't using their docker image?

[SirShashanksonusahu]

how is this self hosting? he is hosting in cloud, not on premise.

[astral]

Are you really self-hosting if you're hosting it on the cloud tho?

[alexanderfournier]

I'm old enough to remember working at companies that didn't use the cloud. Holy fuck was it annoying waiting to get a literal box installed in your datacenter somewhere in the EU. That alone is worth the extra money.

[Wavewave]

Love this. It highlights the difference between more black and white accounting style thinking when running a business vs more long term growth minded thinking. Both are needed but too much one way or the other way isn’t good. I really like your approach to put a value to your hourly time to see if you are actually saving money. if you have past data you can calculate how much growth in income that your time can potentially produce. Even being conservative may paint a very different picture than just focusing on revenue minus expenses. I was about to go down the self host rabbit hole and needed to hear this video. Much thanks.

[sangeeth]

Not everything is about unhealthy hyper-growth. I don't think DHH here was trying to compare themselves to Slack/MS Teams levels of scale + complexity with this move or telling that they can do a better job than those folks by not doing cloud.

[adityamwagh]

I used this video as a monologue in the background. Helped me focus. 😊

[jacobitosuperstar]

What the fuck that this take man... there are plenty of tools to do continous delivery in your VM (i don't know why this guy thinks that a VM in the cloud is not part of the cloud????) that you just didn't use. And the guy of the article said him self many times, that the cloud is good to rent, but not to base your business around it, because it will drain you from your profits (also, I am seeing that you don't know who that guy is or what app he has, that allowed him to do this change, but hey, who am I to tell you anything???). And finally, Netflix is not "full in AWS", like the guy in the article that you skipped through, they use AWS for services that they don't want to replicate.

[JohnDoe-vbks]

I think you make several assumptions, that are not always true:

1. Linear scale for infrastructure maintenance time cost, it's not always the case. I'll argue that in some cases, it'll plateau and can be not that big.
2. That engineers are productive every waking hour. Well, I want to believe that, but practice shows otherwise, so I won't necessary count maintenance time as a loss.

But as always in engineering - it depends, and should be evaluated on a case by case basis.

[MrSurfsAlot]

Well if your website isn't making any money and you don't have any users it doesn't make sense to pay money for a cloud provider. I was just wasting like $70 a month on azure bills for the cheapest tier DB and Windows server .. i'd like to self host but would need to spend $100 to my internet provider for a static IP and haven't had the time to look into work arounds

[redorange]

You have to realize that US engineers are extremely overpaid. An hour of your time would be much less worth outside the US.