We handle traffic spikes with having massive overcapacity while still paying _much_ less than at AWS.
In 2008 we started a browsergame that attracted more than 200.000 players. Until 2009 we had to rent big fat servers that could cope with the load and costed over 4000 € per month. Since then hardware got so fast that our PHP software with 500k line of code and 200GB stuff in databases could run on 3-4 dedicated servers that we could rent from almost every german provider for around 300-500 € per month. Since 2014 we have everything on virtual servers hosted by Hosteurope because we wanted managed hosting like AWS and it was even cheaper than running our old dedicated machines. At that time we looked at AWS and we were totally shocked by the prices (we were also shocked how difficult it is to understand the AWS universe)! We're paying less than a tenth for much more performance than we need than we would pay for even the cheapest, 1 year reservation stuff from AWS. Even if our playerbase would triple overnight, our virtual machines would easily cope with that. And upgrading them needs a two clicks and a reboot.
Also: we see it as a plus that we have not to deal with all the Amazon stuff, because they have so much APIs, names and complexity in their system. Nobody wants to learn all this and nobody wants to deal with multi-location and replication just because amazon has unreliable servers. German providers seems to have datacenters and servers that don't crash every once in awhile. I'm flabbergasted by how often I read that AWS has broken disks, crashed servers, crashed datacenters, network problems and so on. Since 2008 we had two or three problems in the datacenters at our different providers, with a total downtime of 8 hours. That would be just a little less than 99.99% uptime over all the years...
I really wanted to try the new shiny thing that is called AWS but no matter how I looked at it, it is just a very very costly solution for something with built in unreliability.
In 2008 we started a browsergame that attracted more than 200.000 players. Until 2009 we had to rent big fat servers that could cope with the load and costed over 4000 € per month. Since then hardware got so fast that our PHP software with 500k line of code and 200GB stuff in databases could run on 3-4 dedicated servers that we could rent from almost every german provider for around 300-500 € per month. Since 2014 we have everything on virtual servers hosted by Hosteurope because we wanted managed hosting like AWS and it was even cheaper than running our old dedicated machines. At that time we looked at AWS and we were totally shocked by the prices (we were also shocked how difficult it is to understand the AWS universe)! We're paying less than a tenth for much more performance than we need than we would pay for even the cheapest, 1 year reservation stuff from AWS. Even if our playerbase would triple overnight, our virtual machines would easily cope with that. And upgrading them needs a two clicks and a reboot. Also: we see it as a plus that we have not to deal with all the Amazon stuff, because they have so much APIs, names and complexity in their system. Nobody wants to learn all this and nobody wants to deal with multi-location and replication just because amazon has unreliable servers. German providers seems to have datacenters and servers that don't crash every once in awhile. I'm flabbergasted by how often I read that AWS has broken disks, crashed servers, crashed datacenters, network problems and so on. Since 2008 we had two or three problems in the datacenters at our different providers, with a total downtime of 8 hours. That would be just a little less than 99.99% uptime over all the years... I really wanted to try the new shiny thing that is called AWS but no matter how I looked at it, it is just a very very costly solution for something with built in unreliability.