Why We Moved Away from Digital Ocean & Supabase

tl;dr;

We migrated away from various Digital Ocean and Supabase services to Hetzner Cloud and a single raw AWS S3 bucket, saving nearly $1000 per year.

Cloud Pricing Has Gotten Out of Hand

Eventually, the bills I was seeing from Digital Ocean and Superbase kicked me into a bit of cost-savings mode: I realized we were paying over $1000 per year on cloud costs! We're not a crazy infrastructure company either; this was the price tag for just:

• 2x 4GB RAM (virtual) servers
• 1x "Digital Ocean Droplet" - a fancy (and expensive!) $5 / month wrapper for an S3 bucket (good business model for you, Digital Ocean!)
• 1x "Pro Plan" for Supabase

That's it; and the bill was $53 per month from Digital Ocean and $45 per month for Supabase. (Yeah, Supabase "Pro" is "only" $20 a month, but they charge 'compute' costs on top of that, which for us adds another $25 per month.)

This totals $98 per month, or a staggering $1176 per year. While this price is sustainable for us as a company, it comes down to the principal of what's fair and that we're simply paying way too much when there are so many other competitive options out there.

Our new infrastructure, which only costs $181 per year, is minimalistic, pure, and beautiful:

• 1x 8GB RAM (dedicated) Hetzner Cloud server
• 1x AWS S3 bucket

We self-host all the backend services and postgres needed for The Wheel Screener, as well as both the staging and production APIs for CodeVideo. So far, this infrastructure run stably maxing out at about 4-6 GB peak RAM usage - as far as we have seen.

The Infamous "Vendor Lock-In"

Vendors assume that your cloud services are so complex (or poorly deployed, or fragile, or whatever) so that you are locked in, and really after 2020 and so these services really started to get out of control with their pricing. If you're using containerized services and modern architectures, it shouldn't take more than a day max to migrate your services to a new provider. While I can't speak for other companies, I can speak for Full Stack Craft, and this is exactly what we've done.

Conduct Your Cost Checkups Often

To be honest, we should have done this checkup sooner, and we recommend you do the same every few months. It's easy to sweep these costs under the rug, when at least in our case we have a savings of nearly 7x!

Until next time, happy coding!

-Chris