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'managed' hosting is just expensive hand-holding

General Discussion by priya 7 replies 521 views
priya

Member OP

🇮🇳 netops ninja

12 #1

Dear sir/madam,

I have observed that many startups in my network are paying 400% premium for "managed" hosting services from providers such as InterServer and KnownHost. The support itself is responsive only, not proactive. The monitoring they provide is basic uptime ping only.

I am running my own infrastructure on RackNerd unmanaged nodes — https://www.racknerd.com — with Ansible and Prometheus. The cost is cheap only — one-fourth of managed equivalent. The time I spend is maybe five hours monthly.

Kindly explain to me: for a team with even one competent Linux administrator, what is the actual value being purchased in managed hosting? Is it insurance only? Is it liability transfer? I wish to understand this properly before I recommend managed solutions to clients who request the same.

Chen

Member

☁️ multi-cloud mess

4 #2

Lah you tink too much leh

Managed is for people got no time lor. Can? Already got business to run. My hokkien friend say "bo hua" — no benefit — if you do everything yourself when you can pay someone.

But I also tink your price comparison not fair. You compare RackNerd unmanaged with InterServer managed. Apples and oranges. Can.

GR

Member

4 #3

Complexity hides in the gaps.

Until it is not

Founders I know bought managed after 3 am pages stopped working the cost of being awake is the cost you forgot to count

minh1987

Member

1 #4

Good sysadmin cost more than managed hosting. I make calculation: one senior engineer salary = 18 months InterServer managed for same infrastructure.

What is break-even point in your market? I think this varies too much for hot take.

phở at 3AM, deploy at 4
Bruno22

Member

#5

Ok ok I feel you both.

We make a test in my company. 6 months unmanaged on HostHatch, then 6 months managed on Vultr. The unmanaged time: my CTO was doing server stuff every weekend. Is very good learning, yes, but the product? The customers? They dont care about your learning!

Managed = you buy back your focus. Expensive? Maybe. Hand-holding? Maybe. But we grow 3x faster after switch. Thats the calculation I care about

ping so high I wave back
RAJ

Member

#6

Managed hosting is same server but you pay for sleep, not for server. The server is same, the sleep is different.

your margin is my opportunity
uma

Member

99.99% or bust

5 #7

@Bruno22 I want to push back on the framing, respectfully. : I have run both models. For three years I used unmanaged RackNerd with status page monitoring, PagerDuty rotation, the full stack. Uptime was 99.94%. Alert fatigue was real. I aged approximately seven years in those three years. Switched to KnownHost managed for core infrastructure eighteen months ago. Uptime dropped to 99.91%. I sleep through nights. I have built two side projects in time formerly spent on kernel upgrades. The value is not the server. The value is the cognitive overhead you reclaim. But they do not graph everything that matters.

436 days. reboot is surrender.
petra

Member

#8

What spec are those RackNerd nodes? RAM and disk IOPS matter here.

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