• Alaknár@sopuli.xyz
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    2 months ago

    Why do we place so much reliance on one mega company? This level of importance.

    Because it’s cheaper and (in broad terms) more reliable than everybody having a data centre.

    It should be seized by the government.

    Oh yeah, what could possibly go wrong if the US government owned Amazon!

    • Andres@social.ridetrans.it
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      2 months ago

      @Alaknar @jali67 It is absolutely not cheaper. Monopolists have a tendency to raise prices once they corner the market. I took over maintenance of a journalism site and cut hosting costs roughly in half while increasing performance by switching from AWS to DigitalOcean.

      • Alaknár@sopuli.xyz
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        2 months ago

        So, you changed one cloud provider to another…

        But let me rephrase: cloud can be significantly cheaper - if you know what you’re doing and what you’re putting on the cloud.

        I’ve been to data centres that cost as much as a decade of cloud hosting the service they were supporting (and that’s without operational costs).

        Cloud is especially great for small businesses where you have two alternative options: either build your own data centre which you absolutely cannot afford (or risk making it barely operational and unreliable) or host your company at someone else’s DC - which is what cloud is, but worse (because nobody can set up so much resiliency and have so many DC techs/admins as Microsoft or Amazon).

        There absolutely are situations where self-hosting is preferable, and even cheaper, but wondering “why do we place so much reliance” on cloud service providers just shows that people have no clue what cloud actually offers.

    • atmorous@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Best alternatives is making Amazon something owned by the people and not any corporation/government but who knows if that would ever happen