Item — HN Reader

The pricing with such offerings is the biggest throwoff. This one comes out to be more than $58/month for just 1vCpu and 1GiB RAM when used continuously.

Compare this with instances from Hetzner or Contabo or the likes. They are 35+ times cheaper.

This means my total usage across entire month on cloudflare sandbox cannot cross even one single day of non-stop usage, just to break-even with hetzner/contabo/others.

3 comments

That's like comparing any serverless offering to a continuously running host.

Continuously running means you're doing it wrong / it's a bad fit. But yes the ratio is somewhat extreme.

Ideal when traffic is sporadic.

It's interesting to also compare this to getting a bare metal instance and provisioning microVMs on it using Firecracker. (Obviously something you shouldn't roll yourself in most cases.)

You can get a bare metal AX162 from Hetzner for 200 EUR/mo, with 48 cores and 128GB of RAM. For 4:1 virtual:physical oversubscription, you could run 192 guests on such a machine, yielding a cost of 200/192 = 1.04 EUR/mo, and giving each guest a bit over 1GiB of RAM. Interestingly, that's not groundbreakingly cheaper than just getting one of Hetzner's virtual machines!

"Interestingly, that's not groundbreakingly cheaper than just getting one of Hetzner's virtual machines!" .... yea.. cause this is what these companies are doing behind the scenes :)

Cloudflare bills by CPU time. You'll come up on top if you have very irregular traffic as Hetzner bills you 24/7 for your instance.

Exactly. The core-word is "occasional" usage.

As I calculated and mentioned before, if that occasional usage ends up being more than a day in total, dedicated instances end up cheaper.