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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  2d ago (text post)   84 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for October 7, 2025

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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Been meaning to build my own VPN again for a while, had one many moons ago but it died with the ancient blade server a got for free a decade ago.

Trying to think through how to architect it, since I want something off-prem, preferably in a different country. I could just do it how I'd do at work and have something in like an hour, but then Amazon would rob me to the tune of $.09 per gigabyte. Digital Ocean would instead want $.01 per gigabyte, plus a flat $5 or whatever, but it still feels like I'm paying through the nose for bandwidth, and the markup is still crazy.

How does Amazon get away with charging like 1200x the commodity price of bandwidth of a data center provider like hurricane electric?

How does Amazon get away with charging like 1200x the commodity price of bandwidth of a data center provider like hurricane electric?

That's how:

I could just do it how I'd do at work and have something in like an hour

There was a point where I was questioning my own sanity about AWS / GCP / etc. prices because my calculations were showing similar price differences, but any time I take a look it does seem like they charge literal orders of magnitude more, and not just for bandwidth.

Honestly I think the price of ec2 in terms of server time is somewhat reasonable. Not reasonable-reasonable, but like within 4x the cost of actual hardware and electricity, and honestly it's close-to-cost if you sign a year long contract for provisioning.

The way they try to fuck you on bandwidth though is just beyond the pale.

Based on a bit of research I'll probably just slop this out with Hetzner cloud. Their stuff lives in Germany, they charge $.0012/gb going both ways, and ultimately all I need is a dumb pipe that I can kill with little commitment.

Honestly I think the price of ec2 in terms of server time is somewhat reasonable. Not reasonable-reasonable, but like within 4x the cost of actual hardware and electricity, and honestly it's close-to-cost if you sign a year long contract for provisioning.

Last I looked, the moment you ask for something with a bit more RAM, the prices start getting very goofy.

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