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IMO nobody was paying for magic compute. they're paying to not touch ten years of glue.

if agents eat that glue, the moat gets thin fast.

Wow a Claude add embedded into a Hetzner add.

How deep does this go?

Not every fscking story has to be about AI.

Linode is going to lose my business in the next couple months as well. Been there over a decade, have referred countless customers to them, but they’ve kept bumping up prices over and over and I can get a dedicated server at Hetzner or other places with 8x the memory, dedicated NVMe disks, dedicated CPU for cheaper.

Sure you lose a little of the benefit of a “virtual” server which can be migrated but Hetzner’s support has always been super fast and capable, should I wind up in a situation where I’ve got downtime.

I too, am bravely using Claude for more DevOps. I run all of my virtual machines on proxmox atop bare metal servers I own and I’m just blown away at how quickly Claude can optimize and set up entire new networks across all of these machines. Truly feels like a coworker or well paid sysadmin.

I’ve been experimenting with letting a local agent manipulate my remote servers using https://bower.sh/zmx-ai-portal

What’s exciting is how simple cli tools can be so impactful to dev workflows

> Today complex migrations are much simpler to perform, which, I believe, will increase the mobility across providers a lot.

Syntax did a nice episode on this topic recently. They went over where it works well, and where it does not work well.

https://syntax.fm/show/992/migrating-legacy-code-just-got-ea...

Sure, and then you realize it deleted the db to "simplify the migration" lol

Obviously I agree that AI can be useful to write boilerplate, but it's in no way something you should use blindly when trying to do a migration or anything touching prod

So, to be more precise: no, "Claude Code didn't migrate it all". Claude Code helped you write boilerplate so that you could migrate

Now imagine you can do that with a local model. You're basically breaking lockin on _Every_ end. Simply beautiful. A digital guillotine for the digital elite!

yeah, everything is about to be repriced.

This used to be true, but GCP forced their hand in January of 2024 with https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/networking/eliminatin...

AWS matched a few months later:

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/free-data-transfer-out-to-i...

I'm not trying to convince you to stay (I work for neither anymore!), just wanted to note that you can technically request a waiver. I'm not sure how this works in practice though. Like, if you want to leave Athena and move to something on-premise is that enough to have just that workload? Maybe!

Edit: I also didn't follow this at the time, but the AWS wording suggests that the "EU Data Act" is also involved.

It depends on the service and how critical that website is.

Sometimes it's completely acceptable that a server will run for 10 years with say 1 week or 1 month of downtime spread over those 10 years, yes. That's the sort of uptime you can see with single servers that are rarely changed and over-provisioned as many on Hetzner are. Some examples:

Small businesses where the website is not core to operations and is more of a shop-front or brochure for their business.

Hobby websites too don't really matter if they go down for short periods of time occasionally.

Many forums and blogs just aren't very important too and downtime is no big deal.

There are a lot of these websites, and they are at the lower end of the market for obvious reasons, but probably the majority of websites in fact, the long tail of low-traffic websites.

Not everything has to be high availability and if you do want that, these providers usually provide load balancers etc too. I think people forget here sometimes that there is a huge range in hosting from squarespace to cheap shared hosting to more expensive self-hosted and provisioned clouds like AWS.

These articles are popular where there's a mismatch between application requirements and the solution chosen. When someone over-engineers their architecture to be enterprise-grade (substitute your own definition of enterprise-grade) when really they were running a hobby project or a small business where a day of downtime every once in a while just means your customers will come back the next day, going all-out on cloud architecture is maybe not necessary. That's why you see so many comments from people arguing that downtime isn't always a big deal or that risking an outage is fine: There are a lot of applications where this is kind of true.

The confusing part about this article is the emphasis on a zero-downtime migration toward a service that isn't really ideal for uptime. It wouldn't be that expensive to add a little bit of architecture on the Hetzner side to help with this. I guess if you're doing a migration and you're paid salary or your time is free-ish, doing the migration in a zero downtime way is smart. It's a little funny to see the emphasis on zero downtime juxtaposed to the architecture they chose where uptime depends on nothing ever failing

A lot of things don't need that.

Also, don't underestimate the reliability of simplicity.

I was a Linux sysadmin for many years, and I have never seen as much downtime from simpler systems as I routinely see from the more complicated setups. Somewhere between theory and reality, simpler systems just comes out ahead most of the time.

To be fair they were using a single VM on DigitalOcean, so they didn't had the perks of a cloud provider, except maybe the fact that a VM is probably more fault-tolerant than a bare metal server.

Usually those articles describe two situations:

  - they were "on the cloud" for the wrong reasons and migrating to something more physical is the right approach
  - they were "on the cloud" for the right reasons and migrating to something more physical is going to be a disaster

They may be making this decision based on a long history of, in fact, never really having run into "a lot of time in maintenance and future headaches".

In 20 years of hosting all kinds of web services, some of them serving over 200m requests per month, a crashing single server was twice a problem.

Dealing with over engineered bullshit, that behaved in strange ways that disrupted the service was far more often a problem.

So, yes, redundancy is something that can be left away, if you're comfortable to be responsible for fixing things at a Saturday morning.

I don't know about Hetzner but with Upcloud and Vultr my single VPS setups have been more reliable than multiregion with redundancy setups with other providers like Fly.

They already were on "1 big server" (a single VPS at digital ocean) and moved to another "1 big server" (a managed server at hertzner).

They saved money and lost nothing.

Now, if they so wish, they could use a portion of that to increase redundancy - but that wasn't the point of the article.

I was thinking the same. A managed database is just set and forget pretty much. I do NOT miss the old times where I had to monitor my email from routine security checkups hoping my database didn't get hacked by some script kiddie accompanied by blackmail over email.

What are you running on it is the only question which matters, obviously you dont want air traffic control to go down but some app… So what if it goes down? Backup is somewhere else if you even need it anyway. Github has uptime less than 90% according to this: https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/ . And the world keeps turning. Obviously we should strive for better, but also lets please not continue making this uptime fetish out of it, for vast majority of the apps it absolutely doesnt fucking matter.

Downtime happens in all different contexts of life that a web site/service being knocked offline is soo far down the priority list for most people.

It’s amusing that the US government can shutdown for days/weeks/months over budget reasons and there’s no adult discussions that take place about fixing the cause. Yet the latest HN demo that 100 people will use need all 9’s reliability and hundreds of responses.

DO doesn't do high availability droplets, and their migration policy is will try, if we detect poor health of server before it fails.

If someone starts thinking about redundancy and load balancers than DO's solution is rent a second similar sized droplet, and then add their load balancing service. If you do those things with Hetzner instead, you would still be spending less than you did with Digital Ocean.

Personally, what is keeping me on DO is that no single droplet I have is large enough to justify moving on its own, and I'm not prepared to deal with moving everything.

To be fair, modern dedicated servers at hetzner have two power units, and come with a redundand ssd/hdd raid-1 config. AFAIK both ssd and power unit having hotplug capability, so in case either fails they can be replaced with zero downtime.

Given the downtimes we saw in the past year(s) (AWS, Cloudflare, Azure - the later even down several times), I would argue moving to any of the big cloud providers give you not much of a better guarantee.

I myself am a Hetzner customer with a dedicated vServer, meaning it is a shared virtual server but with dedicated CPUs (read: still oversubscribed, but some performance guarantee) and had zero hardware-based downtime for years [0]. I would guess their vservers are on similar redundant hardware where the failing components can be hotswapped.

[0] = They once within the last 3 years sent me an email that they had to update a router that would affect network connectivity for the vServer, but the notification came weeks in advance and lasted about 15 minutes. No reboot/hardware failure on my vServer though.

If you have the setup within server fully scripted and automated (bash, pyinfra or ansible etc) and backups are in place then recovery isn't that hard. Downtime for sure maybe couple of hours for which you can point your DNS entries to a static page while you're restoring everything.

Not a bad tradeoff for 99.8% of shops out there.

I already made a comment here about testing Hatchbox. You point it to your servers and it can set up a cluster and load balancer with a few button clicks.

If you can restore from snapshot to a new instance on cloud provider having running second copy is waste of money.

I know people like FAANG LARPing. Not everyone has budget or need to run four nines with 24/7 and FAANG level traffic.

their original also run on single server ?

If you can tolerate few hours of downtime and some data rollback/loss, single server + robust backups can be viable strategy

I wondered the same! FWIW I'm currently migrating from managed postgres to self-managed on hetzner with [autobase](https://autobase.tech/). Though of course for high availability it requires more than one server.

I agree with you, even for the servers I am responsible for I always make decisions like putting db on supabase instead of local, hosting files on s3 with versioning/multi region etc. then of course come up with a backup and snapshot system.

What time in maintenance? Hetzner has been rock solid for me.

Tbh, my one server paperless deployment has a higher uptime then most services.

If your scaling need is not that high, you can get very far with a single server

Hetzner has cheap load balancers and VMs.

I had like... less than 10 minutes downtime on Hetzner in years (funny enough, that makes my personal containers more reliable than productionized AWS and GCP deployments with their constant partial outages). So perhaps all that complexity (beyond maybe a backup container) isn't really necessary for companies where a bit of downtime doesn't really affect revenue?

Like, I know Leetcode tells otherwise, but most companies really don't need full FAANG stack with 99.999% uptime. A day of outage in a few years isn't going affect bottom lines.

The vast majority of services are actually alright with a little downtime here and there. In exchange, maintenance is a lot simpler with less moving parts.

People underestimate how far you can go with one or two servers. In fact, what I have seen in ky career is many examples of services that should have been running on one or two servers and instead went for a hugely complex microserviced approach, all in on Cloud providers and crazy requirements of reliability for a scale that never would come.

Depends on the app and how long downtime would take.

Deploying a new docker instance or just restoring the app from a snapshot and restoring the latest db in most cases is enough.

> We also find bare metal to be a lot more performant in general

I measured this several years back and never looked at virtual servers again. Since CPU time isn't reserved (like RAM is), the performance is abysmal compared to real hardware.

https://jan.rychter.com/enblog/cloud-server-cpu-performance-...

Moving around k8s deployments is really nice. Very little vendor lockin compared to many of the cloud things you can buy.

My entire stack is.. k8s, hosted Postgres, s3 type storage. I can always host my own Postgres. So really down to k8s and s3. I think hetzner has some kind of s3 storage but haven’t looked into, and I assume moving in 100 TB is a process….

>HA

High availability, in case anyone else was wondering.

> Anyway, if you want to chat about this sometime just ping me an email:

Your post was reasonable until the spam tagline.

Not cool.

It's so bad, I know no one reads the original post on here, but this one was painful

Their customer service is surprisingly hostile. I still use them tho since I'm using them for low stakes stuff

Hm. Hetzners billing stuff is highly automated - but they usually give you about a month to pay your bill if the credit card payment failed for some reason.

How convenient for Amazon to block a competitor this way :(

Not sure what firewall rules you're referring to, but I'm genuinely surprised to see DO being trusted more than Hetzner. I often see DO's ASN when looking at scrapers/hackers, so I'd say it's only a matter of time until they're blocked as well.

DO IPs are way worse.

source: moved away from DO for this very reason.

I wrote about this on a Tor thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47279518

It looks like Hetzner is Tor (and Tor adjacent) friendly, I suggested this might affect IP reputation, 2 users responded they had no IP reputation issues. But it looks like that wasn't quite the whole story

https://community.torproject.org/relay/community-resources/g...

It seems that Hetzner holds 7% of the Tor network. (if I understood the table right)

ironically, blocking aws and azure solved 99% of my bot problems. zero users affected.

so much that I'm thinking of selling nothing but an aws and azure blocker as a service.

Not sure if I understand what you’re trying to say, but Hetzner's Console works just like that too.

There are two interesting parts in the post.

One is about all the steps of zero downtime migration. It's widely applicable.

The other is the decision to replace a cloud instance with bare metal. It saves a lot in costs, but also the loss of fast failover and data backups is priced in.

If I were doing this, I would run a hot spare for an extra $200, and switched the primary every few days, to guarantee that both copies work well, and the switchover is easy. It would be a relatively low price for a massive reduction of the risk of a catastrophic failure.

> Sometimes you just want to click a button and the server or bucket or whatever is ready and here's the access info and it has sane defaults and if I need backups or whatnot it's just a checkbox. Your time is worth money too.

You're describing Hetzner Cloud, which has been like this for many years. At least 6.

Hetzner also offers Hetzner Cloud API, which allows us to not have to click any button and just have everything in IaC.

https://docs.hetzner.cloud/

Coolify on a Hetzner server is giving me the one click service experience

https://xkcd.com/2948/

i've my own flyio style deploy built, where i just use API of digital ocean to roll out my service

i hardly ever visit their website, everything from terminal.

Hetzner normally advertises their hardware servers as 2x 1 TB SSD, because it's strongly recommended to run them in SWraid1 for net 1TB. (Their image installer will default to that)

Once the first SSD fails after some years, and your monitoring catches that, you can either migrate to a new box, find another intermediate solution/replica, or let them hotswap it while the other drive takes on.

Of course though, going to physical servers loses redundency of the cloud, but that's something you need to price in when looking at the savings and deciding your risk model.

And yes, running this without also at least daily snapshotting/backup to remote storage is insane - that applies to cloud aswell, albeit easier to setup there.

It's possible no one will care much if it's down even for that long. I couldn't care less if my HOA mobile app was down even for a week for example. We don't need constant uptime for everything.

> Because with a single-server setup like this, I'd imagine that hardware ...

Yeah. This blog post reads like it was written by someone who didn't think things through and just focused on hyper-agressive cost-cutting.

I bet their DigitalOcean vm did live migrations and supported snapshots.

You can get that at Hetzner but only in their cloud product.

You absolutely will not get that in Hetzner bare-metal. If your HD or other component dies, it dies. Hetzner will replace the HD, but its up to you to restore from scratch. Hetzner are very clear about this in multiple places.

The easiest I’ve done is in MongoDB replication, sharding, failover, and all that is super easy.

Recently, I did it in PostgreSQL using pg_auto_failover. I have 1 monitor node, 1 primary, and 1 replica.

Surprisingly, once you get the hang of PostgreSQL configuration and its gotchas, it’s also very easy to replicate.

I’m guessing MySQL is even easier than PostgreSQL for this.

I also achieved zero downtime migration.

If that's the tradeoff they're willing to make, who are you to say that they're doing it wrong?

Not every app needs 24/7 availability. The vast majority of websites out there will not suffer any serious consequences from a few hours of downtime (scheduled or otherwise) every now and then. If the cost savings outweigh the risk, it can be a perfectly reasonable business decision.

A more interesting question would be what kind of backup and recovery strategy they have, and which aspects of it (if any) they had to change when they moved to Hetzner.

That's a trend which is more and more common nowadays.

I wish the industry would adopt more zero knowledge methods in this regards. They are existing and mathematically proven but it seems there is no real adoption.

- OpenAI wants my passport when topping up 100 USD

- Bolt wanted recently my passport number to use their service

- Anthropic seems wants to have passports for new users too

- Soon age restriction in OS or on websites

I wished there would be a law (in Europe and/or US) to minify or forbid this kind of identity verification.

I want to support the companies to not allow misuse of their platforms, at the same time my full passport photo is not their concern, especially in B2B business in my opinion.

Im in DO and tried to open an account in Heztner. It wont accept my Visa card (which is use to pay DO). So no business from me.

That's nuts. Why do they want a pic of your passport.

Absolutely no to this - reason enough to go with AWS or alternatives. And why are ppl willingly giving it to hosting providers?

Unnecessarily exposing yourself to identity theft if they get compromised.

I signed up for Hetzner a few weeks ago and didn't have to provide any ID. I pay by credit card.

Not sure what differs in our cases, I'm based in EU.

Do they always do this? I never had to present my passport as far as i can remember.

i don't do anything bad and my passport isn't exactly any secret, i gladly submit it too Hetzner.

That’s like saying Mercedes is a scam because you’re fine with a Honda Civic. It’s a totally legitimate preference but not being in the target market doesn’t make something a scam.

Scam? You mostly get what you pay for.

Sure, it cost me £6/mo to serve ONE lambda on AWS (and perhaps 500 requests per month). Sure it was awesome and "proper". But crazy expensive.

I host it now (and 5 similar things) for free on Cloudflare.

But if you need what AWS provides, you'll get that. And that means sometimes it's not the most cost-effective place.

The pricing was always like that. You pay premium for availability of the big spread of cloud services

Hetzner Cloud or their VPS offerings?

Anything worse about the service?

Each has their trade offs. AWS absolutely has a high premium but Hetzner has some quirks.

Recently we had several of our VMs offline because they apparently have these large volume storage pools they were upgrading and suddenly disks died in two large pools. It took them 3 days to resolve.

Hetzner has no integrated option to backup volumes and its roll your own :/ You also can't control volume distribution on their storage nodes for redundancy.

it's not scam, it's like Casino House. Everything is designed to pull your money and make you believe that you are benefiting from it.

I don't think it's fair to call AWS a scam. It's complicated and powerful and it charges a lot for many services compared to a DIY approach. But you can see the prices transparently on its site, it provides a free tier to try most services out, it is fairly good about long term support for services and how it handles forced upgrades when they become necessary, and generally it has an OK reputation for customer support even if something unexpected and very bad happens. You're certainly paying a price for the convenience and the brand but I don't think that's a scam if you're making an informed choice. If you want to save money then you can replace RDS with Postgres running on VMs but the trade off is then you have to manage your database infrastructure yourself.

AWS has always been a scam.

It's worse than Oracle and they don't even use lawyery contracts.

The technology itself is the tendrils.

I have experience in migrating large DBs with replication and the article not discussing write blocks made my ears perk up as well.

Aside from the blocking you mentioned during the initial snapshot, you'd need to block writes to the old DB before the cutover as well. There's no way to guarantee in-flight writes to the old DB aren't lost when promoting the replica to a primary otherwise. I'm surprised the author didn't go into more detail here. Maybe it was fine given their workload, but the key issue I see is that they promoted the new DB to a primary before stopping the old application. During that gap, any data written to the old DB would be lost.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but done with a proxy in-between that can "pause" requests, you could have done the move with 0 seconds and no rejected requests, and I don't think mydumper/myloader/xtrabackup matters for that. The "migration" would be spinning up a new database, making it catch up, then switching over. If you can pause/hang in-flight requests while switching, not a single one needs to fail :)

The "where's the HA?" comments are missing that this was a single DO droplet before. The migration didn't reduce redundancy, it just moved the single point of failure from one provider to another for 1/6 the cost. The HA conversation is worth having, but it's a separate conversation from this migration.

Has Hetzner discontinued their US data center?

Try OVH Canada they have good prices and service

Or just nix. The new hardware deployment would have been one nixos-build or colmena call, not accounting for the data migration of course.

When some component in OP's dedicated server fails, they will find out what that extra DO money was going toward. The DO droplet will live migrate to a healthy server. OP gets to take an extended outage while they file a Hetzner service ticket and wait for a human to perform the hardware replacement. Do some online research and see how long this often takes. I don't believe this Hetzner dedicated server model even has redundant PSUs.

Anyone who thinks DO and Hetzner dedicated servers are fungible products is making a mistake. These aren't the same service at all. There are savings to be had but this isn't a direct "unplug DO, plug in Hetzner" situation.

The comparison is somewhat skewed, since they went from an (expensive) virtual server to a cheaper dedicated server (hardware).

One of the new risks is if anything critical happens with the hardware, network, switch etc. then everything is down, until someone at Hetzner go fixes it.

With a virtual server it’ll just get started on a different server straight away. Usually hypervisors also has 2 or more network connections etc.

And hopefully they also got some backup setup.

It’s still a huge amount of of savings and I’d probably do the same of I were in their shoes, but there is tradeoffs when going from virtual- to dedicated hardware.

I moved from Heztner to DO because my Hetzner IPs kept getting spoofed and then Hetzner would shut down my servers for "abuse". This hasn't happened once on DO, and I'm happy to pay a little more.

> We need more competition across the board. These savings are insane and DO should be sweating, right?

As the other person already said here, this blog post comparison is skewed.

BUT

EU cloud providers are much better value for money than the US providers.

The US providers will happily sit there nickle and diming you, often with deliberately obscure price sheets (hello AWS ;).

EU cloud provider pricing is much clearer and generally you get a lot more bang for your buck than you would with a US provider. Often EU providers will give you stuff for free that US providers would charge you for (e.g. various S3 API calls).

Therefore even if this blog post is skewed and incorrect, the overall argument still stands that you should be seriously looking at Hetzner or Upcloud or Exoscale or Scaleway or any of the other EU providers.

In addition there is the major benefit of not being subject to the US CLOUD and PATRIOT acts. Which despite what the sales-droids will tell you, still applies to the fake-EU provided by the US providers.

For what I use Hetzner for, and OP from the article, Hetzner only has dedicated servers in Europe, so there really isn't anything to compare to :) If I need dedicated servers in the US, I'd probably go with Vultr.

I think Hetzner makes most sense (for myself, and OP seemingly too) because they have dedicated servers, and they're in Europe. Extra bonus is the unmetered connection, but primarily just good and cheap servers :)

> For example, I've started running on Hetzner with Cloudflare Tunnels.

How much latency does this add?

You didn't consider inflation. 2013's $5 is $7 in today's money. Today's $4 equals roughly 2013's $2.82.

So a near 44% price reduction for a 50% reduction in only one of the components. Looks like progression to me.

Managed services have value. It's less to set up, less to maintain, and less worrying about waking up at 3am when something breaks.

I've spent time eating the costs of things like DigitalOcean or SaaS products because my time is better spent growing my revenue than reducing infrastructure costs. But at some point, costs can grow large enough that's it's worthwhile to shift focus to reducing infrastructure spend.

We used to run some servers in a colo, we had 4u.

The problem with actually owning hardware is that you need a lot of it, and need to be prepared to manage things like upgrading firmware. You need to keep on top of the advisories for your network card, the power unit, the enterprise management card, etc. etc. If something goes wrong someone might need to drive in and plug in a keyboard.

Eventually we admitted to ourselves we didn't want those problems.

“Your own server in a colo” means going to the colo to swap RAM or an SSD when something goes wrong. You rent a server and the benefit is the rentor has spare parts on hand and staff to swap parts out.

You have to deal with a lot more stuff. You have to order/pay for a server (capex), mount it somewhere, wire up lights-out-mgmt and recovery and do a few more tasks that the provider has already done.

Then, say if the motherboard gives up, you have to do quite a bit of work to get it replaced, you might be down for hours or maybe days.

For a single server I don't think it makes sense. For 8 servers, maybe. Depends on the opportunity cost.

> why not your own server in a colo?

Have you seen what the LLM crowd have done to server prices ?

I Guess hetzner is basically "your server in colo"

It's also expensive (redundant server hardware, xconnect, power, firewall(s), PSU access, smart hands, sysadmin).

But it's indeed cheaper with high, sustained workloads.

Bit of waste of time for a server. Only makes sense if you actually need at least half a rack

It's an average of 8GB per database, I guess he serves multiple clients and decided to "segregate" each client on its instance. If it's acceptable for the business it's nothing wrong with his setup.

> 30 db instances

They didn't say that and the article didn't allude to that. 1 instance with 30 databases.

I hope your backups are in order.

When I hear OVH I immediately think about their burning datacenters …

My fail2ban is loaded with DO scanners everyday.

Yeah just how it is even outside of the cloud. At some point nearly all companies eventually try to take advantage of inertia and vendor lock in, if you are willing to undertake the pain of switching it's almost always a savings.

Where did you migrate out to?

without looking at either the article or the pricing pages, on any of the relevant providers, just what's on the title of this thread and your comment

> $1,432 to $233

a difference of 5/6 in price does not materially change the decision to move between providers, even with a 40% price increase

You could have loaded the Hetzner pricing page and checked - the server in the article is currently listed around $30/month higher. Not enough to materially change the equation

That's not the point. You should be asking why DO is so much more expensive.

Not everyone likes wasting money.

If you only have Rs. 100 in your pocket, you will think hard before spending Rs. 10. If you have Rs. 1000 in your pocket, you will not mind spending Rs. 10. That said, even if you are financially sound, why in the world would you want to pay $14k extra for a similar service that is available cheaper? That money could be better utilised elsewhere.

It's a nice chunk of change, which you could use for other purposes. It might not make or break the company, but it could pay for something that actually generates business.

Tale a look at https://www.google.com/finance/quote/USD-TRY?window=MAX

when i save money on something without losing performance or reliability, i feel like a real hacker and money saved is just cherry on top of self accomplishment i feel.

I suspect with that money you could get a full time customer support person for your business. Now think about it, what's creating more value to your customers: having your infra on Digital Ocean or having a better customer support?

Bet I can get 2x more from spending that in anthropic tokens than paying you a full year salary

Think of it in percentage savings.

You can get an (a bit less than) a full employee for that. And that's a better ROI than just throwing it away.

I work with Linux deployments for a living and I have no idea what you are talking about.