Escaping Google's Grasp: Tools for the Privacy-Minded | Chaos Lever

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Chris: So if you had been responsible and created this on time, none of this would ever, ever happened.

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Ned: Yes. If I had done something responsible and timely, none of this would have happened. It's my fault. It's not a poor interface on the part of ZenCaster at all.

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Chris: It's also a really good name for your autobiography. It's my fault, the Ned Bellavance story.

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Ned: Oh, God, that's much shorter than what I said. Probably better. I don't want this to be like a Fiona Apple situation.

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Chris: Well, I have a gift for tersness.

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Ned: Hello, a legend human, and welcome to the Chaos Lover podcast. My name is Ned, and I'm definitely not a robot, although I do tend to be verbose, like the debug output of the console port on a robot. But I am a real human person with feelings, dreams, lots of thoughts about stuff. With me is Chris, who also has a serial console port.

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Chris: I told you that in confidence, sir.

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Ned: Well, you were very confident about it. You shoved it in my face.

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Chris: One bit at a time.

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Ned: That's why it's serial. I'd hate to see your parallel port.

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Chris: How do we get sideways? It's two minutes into the podcast. What's wrong with you?

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Ned: Well, if you connect the parallel port sideways, it's just serial. Again.

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Chris: Out.

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Ned: You didn't even pause to see if I was right.

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Chris: It's not relevant. It reminds me of Scuzzie, and I'm very uncomfortable.

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Ned: Oh, God, Scuzzie. I remember when it was called Scuzzie because I called it SCSI, and I was mocked.

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Chris: Well, it's on my list of things that you should just say the letters instead of trying to pronounce it, which in my mind is everything.

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Ned: I know. You famously hate acronyms, and you're more of an initialism. It's not SQL. It's SQL.

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Chris: Show me the E. Show it to me. Exactly.

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Ned: All right. I mean, I will let that one pass. I'm not too particular about it as long as I understand what the hell you're talking about. Yeah. Speaking of acronyms that you don't like, pretty good transition there. Not bad. Today's part 2 of our Living Life Without Being Poisoned by Fang series. What did we cover in part one? Because I don't remember. That was more than five minutes ago.

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Chris: Just as a really quick reminder, Fang is actually an old fashioned acronym. The names don't make any sense anymore for a couple of them, but it used to stand for Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google. This was a collection of companies that in the technology sphere that people thought were the next big thing, and this is where you have to go invest. So originally, it didn't actually even start out as really a technical thing. It was a financial thing. But we are using it to talk about tech giants who make a lot, a lot, a lot of money off of their users, and in particular, ways that they do it by violating your privacy and generally being untrustworthy and gross as corporate entities.

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Ned: Yes. And at the top of the pyramid, maybe not the worst, but at the top, today we're going to cover Google because we already talked about Facebook. Did we talk about Twitter? Like, briefly?

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Chris: We talked about Facebook. We bundled We talked about Apple and Microsoft together. We talked a tiny bit about Twitter, and we talked about Amazon.

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Ned: Okay. And that's a lot of ground that we covered, which is why this is a two-part episode.

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Chris: Right.

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Ned: And today we're going to We have to talk about advertising company Google.

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Chris: When it comes to companies that make money by being completely untrustworthy and selling your data over and over again, If Facebook is the worst, Google is definitely their inspiration, the grandfather nightmare company that has no respect for you or your personal privacy. They were there first, baby. They've spent the last at least 15 years making all their services just a little bit worse every day so that they can sell ever more ads. And I know the people get tired of us calling them advertising company Google, but we do it because it's apt. It's apt.

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Ned: Yes.

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Chris: To quote Yahoo Finance, Of all the $237. 9 billion Alphabets, which is the holding company of Google, generated in ad revenue in 2023, 175 billion or 73. 6% came from Google Search. When they mean income came from Google Search, they mean ads on Google Search.

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Ned: Right.

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Chris: Total revenue in 2023, $307 billion. So yeah, when 77% of your income comes for advertising, you're an advertising company.

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Ned: Yep.

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Chris: Side note, I think they just lost a case and they're getting yelled at by the government, which is amazing all things considered. So maybe they won't even be as much of an advertising company later.

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Ned: That's true. We may have covered that in Tech News of the Week. You should go back and find out.

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Chris: Which- Google has a bajillion products, I think is the official count. It might be a bajillion and six. I didn't look today. Many of those products people begin to use and just never stop using, much like a bank.

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Ned: Yeah.

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Chris: Gmail is a prime example, especially if you got in early and have a Gmail account that you actually really like.

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Ned: That's me. I'm pretty sure I got a Gmail in 2006-ish.

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Chris: Yeah, I was in whatever the private beta was. Because I am that much of a loser?

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Ned: There was a group of people at work and beyond that were using Gmail because it had copious storage at the time. You got one gig for free in the private preview. It was unbelievable. Unbelievable. And they were using it to share MP3s of interesting bands they found. And because I enjoy listening to interesting bands, that's how I got my invite. Is there like, Oh, Ned, you like music? Here, let me give you this invite to this Gmail thing. And that was 20 years ago. I still have the same email address.

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Chris: Speaking of bands from 20 years ago, you know who I recently found out about? Hollywood Undead.

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Ned: Names familiar? Familiar?

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Chris: Are you good? Apparently, I'm in discrimo.

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Ned: Oh, God. I'm so sorry. I know.

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Chris: But also- I told my therapist, and my therapist said, Get a new therapist.

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Ned: He doesn't want to hear about all that.

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Chris: But anyway, point is, people start using Gmail because at the time it was great. It had some unbelievable features. The storage was one. The spam filtering was another. But there's more. There's the larger Google Workspaces. That's Google Docs, that's Google Sheets, that's Google fill in the blank, whatever it is to cover for Microsoft Office, right? But here's the thing. I say that it's common knowledge, but I'm not sure how common this knowledge actually is. It's quasi-common knowledge that Google can and does read all of your material for advertising purposes, but also for training AI. All of it. If you didn't know that, now you know that. And that's actually in their terms and conditions in a way that is pretty clear.

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Ned: If anybody actually reads them.

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Chris: Well, there's that. Link in the show notes if you want to check this one out for yourself, because most people don't believe me when I say this. It's right there in black and white.

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Ned: If you pay for Google Workspaces, like the G Suite, does that exempt you in any way from this reading of material?

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Chris: It's better.

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Ned: So no.

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Chris: It's better. Now, think about it, though. I mean, they do sell Google Workspaces to K12s and stuff like that, and they can't use that information. So there are definitely ways to do it. If you pay for it and you qualify I guess. I honestly don't remember. But for the vast majority of people, that's not how they ingest these services. No.

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Ned: No. They signed up for Gmail 20 years ago, and now every email that I have gotten has been read by Google in some way. I remember when they announced that was going to be part of the service, and some portion of people were very offended by this and left Gmail, and I just couldn't care enough at the time.

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Chris: Yeah, you were very much not alone then or now. No, I know.

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Ned: Not always the best crowd to be in.

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Chris: Luckily, there are a lot of tools that can be used to get away from Google. I can't talk about all of them. I picked a couple.

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Ned: Okay.

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Chris: Let's start with Search, the thing that made Google famous and the thing that sucks now.

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Ned: Totally.

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Chris: There are more than a few options for searching the internet that are not Google or Or at least there's a proxy, which we'll talk about in detail in a second. It is also common knowledge that Google search results have been getting worse and worse as the company prioritizes, you guessed it, advertising revenue over quality results. There can still be an argument made that Google search is the best search engine. But that could also be because we are used to using Google and have adapted to its weird way of finding things. Other things exist. Bing is Microsoft's search engine. And if you use that, well, we all know why. Sinners. Tisk. Tisk.

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Ned: Indeed.

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Chris: Duckduckgo is a very easy one to use. It's one of those proxies I was talking about before. You send your query to duck, duck, go. They anonymize it. They send it to Bing. Bing answers. It comes back to you without Bing ever knowing who you are specifically as a user. Start Page is another one that does the same thing. This one is interesting, and honestly, I need to look more into it because I've heard the name but have never used it. So I'm going to go right with their market texture here because that's always accurate. Start page allows you to obtain Bing and Google search results while protecting user privacy and not storing personal information and removing all trackers. So it's basically the same idea. There's the front-end, which takes your query, sends it to Google in a bunch with thousands of other people's queries. So there's no way to really tie that back to you as the end user. And they don't save your information so they don't know what you search for either. It's not bad. For some use cases, it's probably making the best of a bad situation. But again, that's not it.

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Chris: There is also, and again, I'm just picking one example, a search engine company called Kagi, K-A-G-I. T-l-d-r, Kagi is great.

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Ned: All right.

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Chris: Kagi's business model is very appealing to certain people, and by certain people, I definitely mean me. They are a search engine that you have to pay for. I know. It's crazy.

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Ned: How dare they?

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Chris: You have a lot of features within Kagi to customize it to yourself. You can promote or limit certain types of sites. You can simply right-click, I think it's a hamburger, and say, Exclude results from this site forever. There's a bunch of other stuff that you can do that really makes it more of a you conversation with the search engine than it is the anonymous nightmare that is Google search. If you pay just that little bit extra, you remember all that proxy stuff I was talking about before? You can now do that with every major paid and free AI model out there. I'm probably going to do more about Caggy later, but TLDR, in terms of this type of service, I totally think it's worth the money.

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Ned: For what it's worth, I've had several privacy and security-minded people recommend Caggy to me as a really good alternative for Google and all of its ilk. I looked it up, the monthly cost for their starter pack is five bucks. But if you want to use it as a daily driver, I think the starter pack limits you to 300 searches a month, which I definitely go over that in two days. If you want to use it as your daily driver, then you pay 10 bucks a month or $9 if you pay annually, which is still not bad. You might balk at paying for something that is ostensibly free, searches. But just remember that free means that you are the product being sold to others. It's Because the fact that we started with internet search being free to begin with gave people this false perception that it should be free. But if you think about the value that internet search delivers to you, Ten dollars is not a big ask.

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Chris: I think it's interesting because they also allow you, I want to say it's 100 searches just for free for zero dollars, just so you can compare and contrast the search results. But yeah, I think it's That's interesting, too, because the Kage Service actually counts the amount of times you search. I'm not going to share that much information because that's none of your business, sir, but let's just say a lot.

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Ned: Yes. I I'm thinking about signing up for it. I want to test drive it a little bit more and see if I like the way that it produces results, but I have a feeling I will. Since I use Search for business, I could definitely write this off as a business expense. Not everybody has that luxury, but I do, so I'm going to.

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Chris: We'll leave Search off to the side for a second. Maybe we'll revisit this in a few months after you have a chance to look at it.

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Ned: Sure.

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Chris: Getting away from Search, let's talk about Google email. And this is annoying. Yeah. Because back in my day, you could just go ahead and run your own email server on your own connection in your own house and be done with it. That, unfortunately, is getting less and less realistic. And this is something we've talked about. The very model of SMTP made it inevitable that as a protocol, it would be abused by bad people, spam scammers, criminals, in-laws, the whole nine yards. Now, running a small server on a new IP these days will basically just get you blacklisted by default. Because the chances are some scammer has used that IP address, sent out 15,000 jerky emails, gotten blocked, canceled their subscription, and moved on to the next IP address already. The amount of work that you have to do to get cleared is absurd, and it never ends. This is a bummer because it's actually fun to run your own engine if you want. All right, fun for certain people.

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Ned: Yeah, I was going to say, not everybody wants to run postfix for the rest of their lives, but you do you.

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Chris: The reality is if you want your own email, and by that, I mean your own domain, it's probably going to have to be hosted by some major company that has enough clout to get around these problems.

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Ned: Yeah, I mean, you can still run your own mail server if you want to, but if you want reliable delivery, you're going to have to leverage some SMTP relay service. Even if you were running your own mail server, not at home, home, but you were renting out a server on a VPS, a virtual provision server or whatever that stands for, most of them already have their IP ranges completely blocked because of abuse by spammers. And trying to run it at home, Comcast, and I think Verizon, too, they just block port 25 right off the bat. You can't even use your IP address to send mail. I think if you go up to the business tier, you can, but you have to then pay for the business tier, and you still will probably get blacklisted.

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Chris: Which is 10 times as expensive.

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Ned: Oh, yeah, absolutely. What SMTP Relay services do is they actively protect their blocks of IP addresses, and they also police the use of their services to make sure nobody's getting up to anything that's too spammy. I mean, there's still going to be some spam, but it can't be egregious. So sendgrid, mailgun, and you can even use AWS SES if you're not sending a ton of mail. You send Five messages a day. You could probably get away with that. The downside is that they can see all the mail flowing through their service. Not the contents necessarily, but they can see the source, destination, and the volume. So if you're worried about snooping, I guess just don't Use email? Or go with a company that's dedicated to privacy.

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Chris: Right. Even then, no matter what, if the email is going over port 25, it's going to be a problem.

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Ned: Yeah, since that's plain text. You probably want to use secure SMTP.

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Chris: But if you still want to handle the basics, there is one company that I would recommend to host your email, and that is Proton Mail. Proton Mail is a company that is dedicated to user privacy in a couple of different ways. They've got a VPN solution we're not going to talk about. They've got cloud storage solution we don't need to talk about. There's more to it than just email. But with Proton, you can pay, you can have a single proton. Me email address, or if you want, they will host your MX record for your personal domain. They're a company that's big enough, and they've been around long enough that all that blocking stuff we were talking about before is not going to be an issue. I like it a lot. They've also got a new service that they added in if you're a paying customer, where you can get basically a disposable email address from Proton Mail that would all go to your inbox. If you want to sign up for a newsletter or if you want to... Whatever you're trying to do, if you want to send an anonymous email because your neighbor keeps throwing their lawn waste into your yard and you don't want to getting back to them.

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Chris: Not that that ever happens because people are always great.

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Ned: Very specific there, Chris. I don't know what you mean.

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Chris: Let's move on.

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Ned: Yeah, my regret about having the Gmail account is I've had it for 20 plus years, and I can't move that email address to a different mail service because it's gmail. Com. Instead of using my own domain, which I do have a work email that has my own domain, which I could move to any service that I want, I wish the same was the case for Gmail.

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Chris: Right. I mean, therein lies the rub. People know the @gmail. Com part is part of your email address. Changing it over is a big pain in the butt. It's like changing your cell phone number.

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Ned: That might even be worse. I don't even want to contemplate that.

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Chris: Anyway, moving on. Another service that is super popular and also controversial from Google is YouTube. This is a hard one to get away from because they're by far the biggest and most impactful user-hosted video site on Earth.

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Ned: Yes.

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Chris: But I mean, there's Twitch. There's Vimeo. Yep. That's still a Google thing.

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Ned: Yeah.

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Chris: A lot of music videos make it up there, if I remember correctly.

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Ned: Yeah. Well, what's interesting is YouTube's model is that creators can upload essentially as much as they want for no cost because their model is to show consumers ads on the platform. The more video that exists on the platform, the more ads they can show you. It's in their interest to just be like, Yep, Fire hose, give us all your stupid videos. Right. Vimeo actually charges creators to upload and to host video. There is a free plan that you can upload. I forget how much. It's not very much space that you get. But if you're going to be serious about it in any way, you do have to pay for hosting, and that flips the cost model on its head. It also means that creators don't have a way to make money directly on Vimeo because if you're a YouTuber, you could potentially make money off of ads. Not really, but in theory, you could. That's not going to happen with Vimeo. It's more for promotion or sales or lead generation. I think that's why music videos tend to end up on there, because it's really about promoting the artist and going and buying their products as opposed to being shown ads.

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Ned: As a consumer, that's better. You're not going to see ads, but you also won't find as much content on Vimeo. That's the same for a lot of the other platforms out there.

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Chris: Yeah. The only other one I wanted to touch on is one that I actually just started looking at recently, and it's called Nebula. If you watch any YouTube channels, chances are you found a creator who said, Please, for the love of God, come watch my channel on Nebula.

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Ned: Yes.

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Chris: So Nebula is a paid service which has no ads, which is great. And they have videos that are hosted by the creators. You don't get to comment on the videos. It's just you click play, you watch the video, and you move on with your life. I thought at first I was not going to like this, but actually, I really, really, really, really, really like this. Because here's the thing about YouTube comments. They suck.

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Ned: They do.

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Chris: It's false, weird engagement What is that called? Parasocial.

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Ned: Parasocial Relationships. Yeah. Yeah.

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Chris: Not great. Stop it. Stop commenting on YouTube.

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Ned: I've never been a commenter in general. I've signed up for Nebula, I want to say, a year and a half, a few years ago, and I will typically see a new video come out on YouTube, but the creator posts the same thing on Nebula without the ads and a little bit of extra content. So I'll just jump over to Nebula and watch it on Nebula instead. So, yeah.

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Chris: And the last advantage that Nebula has is it's owned by the creators, and there's a ton more editorial and content freedom than they have on YouTube.

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Ned: And just generally, the videos are going to be higher quality.

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Chris: For sure. Yeah.

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Ned: Yeah. That part is nice, too. Now, another thing that has arisen over time, and we talked about this last time in terms of social media, is the Fediverse. Do they have a video alternative? There are a few. One's called D-Tube, which is supposed to be distributed YouTube. Another one's PeerTube, and then another one called Play-Yoh, which is spelled weird, and I'm not going to bother spelling it. D-tube seems to rely on some cryptocurrency nonsense. That's how you get paid on the channel. I tried to go to their main page and it wouldn't even load any videos, so that seems less than ideal, but about par for anything Web3 related. Playur imports your YouTube content and hosts it. Interesting approach. You don't actually get off of YouTube as a creator. You host your content on both both, but it does allow people to subscribe to your channel and pay you actual money. Yeah, maybe. They make some pledges about privacy and whatnot, so that's a possibility. Then PeerTube uses peer-to-peer video hosting, so your mileage may vary depending on which server you end up connected to. Honestly, if you're a consumer and you're looking to watch cool videos and not have your personal information cold and processed and cataloged, it's probably best to pay for a service like Nebula.

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Ned: Or if you're into movies, I hear Mubi, M-U-B-I is quite good for watching movies. There are other options that are not YouTube.

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Chris: Tldr. Yeah. Last thing we'll touch on with Google is something that people use a ton, and that is the Google applications. That's the Google Sheets, Google Docs, et cetera. There are alternatives out there. Some are better than others. I have one I wanted to highlight that I'm only now just digging into. It's called CryptPad, and the company is an open-sourced, collaboration-based office suite. It is also end-to-end encrypted and intended to be private forever. So basically, double middle finger to Google's entire business model. I played with it a little bit. The interface is actually pretty funny because it looks an awful lot Microsoft Office from 2007.

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Ned: When Microsoft Office was good.

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Chris: But it actually works. I used it in a collaborative way as an experiment. It didn't crash. It saved the document. I was able to go back out, come back in. It was still there. It's worth checking out if this is the thing that's interesting to you. The end-to-end encryption part is super important because worst case scenario, nobody will ever be able to read your documents if the service goes completely bankrupt for whatever reason. If that with Google, only Google will be able to read your documents, which is probably not better.

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Ned: No, not really.

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Chris: I just want to address to one more cool quasi-free service that is an alternative to a massive company It's actually an alternative to Adobe's Photoshop. I know they're not technically one of these companies in terms of being a fang company, but Photopia is awesome. It is a photo-editing website that very closely mimics Photoshop's functionality and workflows without all of the gross adobe smell coming off of it. It's advertising-based, but you can also pay for it if you want it to be advertising-free. But in terms of, really, especially if you have something that you need to make a quick change and paint can't do it, but you don't feel like opening Photoshop, this has been my go-to for years. Also, I will just tell everybody the same thing I tell my students, it is not pronounced photopea, it is pronounced photopia. If you pronounce it photopea, you're automatically getting an F.

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Ned: Harsh, but I understand. I guess the ultimate point is there are alternatives to all of Google's services and products maybe worth checking out. Let's move on to something that's a little more enterprise-aimed, cloud services.

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Chris: Yay. Because although this is a new thing, they didn't have these in nearly the same number or import in 2013, Google, Microsoft, Amazon have on offer cloud services. Names you've heard of and dread every month before the bill comes in.

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Ned: Indeed.

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Chris: I'll admit, the jury is still out on whether these are data collecting mechanisms for these companies. Chances are it's probably not as much of a risk considering it's enterprise and these are not cheap.

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Ned: Yeah.

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Chris: But you never know. Let's be honest, one of the things we've learned from researching this episode is that these companies cannot ever be trusted. More importantly, they don't care about not being trusted. So your mileage may vary. Alternate services, though, do exist. A lot of this is going to come down to, what is your workload? What do you truly need? Because most of the time you don't need AWS. No. Let's start with Linode. This is a Philadelphia-based company that I'm reluctant to recommend because I'm still mad about how my interview went with them. Not that I'm being petty.

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Ned: Not at all.

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Chris: They have been around for ages and are a really good option. They are a DevOps-focused and DevOps engineer operated shop with a lot of in-house expertise, and a lot of people really, really love working with them. There are even smaller companies, and again, this is going to come down to what is your workload. But you could go to a company like DigitalOcean or Vulture and get microsystems. Digitalocean sells what they call drops, I think. Their cost for a system, a fully hosted system that you can log into and type things at the command line and everything for $4 a month. Now, admittedly, not a lot of workloads are going to be able to stay at that size and still be functional, but it's still going to be really tough to beat that price at AWS.

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Ned: I remember when we were doing cloud consulting and we were trying to do outreach and replatforming folks, and we talked to a customer who was using a virtual private server instance on some mom and pop cloud, and they were paying something like $20 a month for that DPS. We priced out on Azure and AWS the exact same server dimensions as well as protections and all that stuff. It was six the cost, at least. And that was the end of that conversation. Because why does he need any of that? He didn't. Now, if you're comfortable working at the bare metal level, it also might be worth checking out Equinox Metal Service, formerly known as Packet, as they offer bare metal as a service. And, crap. When I went to check out the pricing for a metal, while I was writing this portion of the episode, I discovered that Equinox is in fact, shuttering that service on June 2026, and it is not accepting any new customers. So never mind on that. I know. I was disappointed because I used Packet before they were acquired, and I really liked it. It was so nice to just get bare metal access to a server, especially for weird lab stuff that only worked on bare metal.

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Ned: And now I'm going to have to find somebody else that offers that.

[00:31:58.23]
Chris: Fly. Io Fly. Io is another service that was recommended to me when I was asking around for people's favorites. I have not done anything too much in-depth with them yet, but it seems like they do containerized deployment models, and they have the big three. They're fast, they're flexible, and they're cheap.

[00:32:14.11]
Ned: Yeah, Fly. Io is very interesting, and they might take a little bit of umbrage at saying containerized deployment because they don't actually use container images directly. They spin up micro VMs using Firecracker. Every application that spins up has its own little fire cracker instance that it's being unzipped into, but they can use a container image format to deliver that. But the point is, like you said, they are fast. Your workloads spin up super quick. They're very flexible, they are very cheap, and they're not hosting their stuff on AWS or any of the other major CSPs, so you don't have to worry that you're accidentally stuffing Bezos's pockets. I interviewed their CEO for the day 2 DevOps podcast. We were talking about the interesting IPv6 and IPv4 stuff they have to do under the hood. And wow, did that guy know a lot about IPv4 and IPv6. Their whole staff seems to be very technical. This service is aimed at developers who don't want to run infrastructure and want simple and speedy deployments. So it depends on your use case, but definitely worth checking out. If you want to run an application and you were a fan of Heroku back in the day.

[00:33:34.16]
Chris: Who wasn't, really?

[00:33:36.16]
Ned: Me.

[00:33:39.12]
Chris: Last one I had on my list, if you're of the European persuasion, there is a company in Germany that does cloud servers that you can sign up for on an auction basis, which is definitely interesting in terms of the way that it prices, but cheaper in a lot of cases.

[00:33:56.23]
Ned: Yeah, I remembered the name Hetzner from other blog posts that I've read, and one came back to me. That's guy Alexander Samzig. He did an interesting breakdown of EU-focused CSPs on his blog. He was running an application in AWS, and he wanted it to run in an EU-only service. He wanted to see what was out there for cloud service providers that were specifically just running in the EU. He looked to see if each candidate in his list He came up with a few different things to check. Do they have a popular Terraform provider, one that has millions of downloads? Do they have a managed PAS for things like managed database, managed storage, managed Kubernetes, those kinds of things? And also whether the platform allows you to sign up without talking to a human, which is always a plus in my book. Don't need to talk to people if I just want to try out your stupid service. The current winner, and he actually has kept this He updated it at the beginning of April. The current winner in his estimation is a company called Scaleway because they ticked basically every box he had, and they also offer VPS and bare metal services, if that's more to your liking.

[00:35:15.22]
Ned: So now I have a bare metal service I can use again. You don't have to be living in the EU or have a business in the EU to leverage their services. Just be aware that that's where their stuff is hosted today. Right.

[00:35:29.16]
Chris: One One thing to note about all of this stuff, these services that we've been talking about, is that they absolutely will not have the entire width and breadth of services that the big three have. But there are other major players out there that might. The Gartner Magic Quadrant would like you to remember that Oracle and IBM both have clouds that exist and are real things. They super promise.

[00:35:56.01]
Ned: For sure, he sees.

[00:35:58.18]
Chris: Although if you listen the past week's news breakdown, you might be a tad hesitant to look at Oracle.

[00:36:05.06]
Ned: Just a little bit. I would also be wary of other alleged CSPs that are essentially hosting their platform on one of the big three. They may obfuscate that from you, but if you're really interested in avoiding Microsoft or Amazon or Google, make sure to do your homework and find out where things are actually being hosted.

[00:36:26.21]
Chris: Right. Yeah, I mean, overall, figuring out how to get away from it if you want something of that size is a tough question. In order to have that a massive footprint and upon dozens of regions and 300 services available to you as the consumer, what are you going to do? You're going to end up with a massive company. But again, when it comes to these cloud solutions in particular, the $64,000 question is, what do you really need?

[00:37:00.11]
Ned: Exactly. When you look at the services that people actually consume on the big clouds, it's essentially object storage, compute, virtual networking, and database as a service. That's it. Everything else is just maybe we'll experiment with it. If that's all you care about, there are plenty of other cloud services that have those things. You're not going to have to pay the upcharge of AWS, and they're ridiculous transfer fees. You could also host stuff yourself. It's not glamorous. It requires some technical acumen. But for very little money, you can spin up some machines locally, and it will only cost you the electricity to run them. And even then, get a solar panel. It won't cost you anything. A current Raspberry Pi 5, that's the current model, that has 16 gigs of memory in it, and a quad-core processor is 120 bucks. The system consumes about 12 watts when it's running at peak, which is a pittance compared to how much an EC2 instance is going to cost you. Like I said, if you can find a solar panel that will give you 12 watts, then you pay nothing. If you're running a personal project, a simple service, or just a website, a couple of raspberry pies running on your desktop or in a closet could be plenty.

[00:38:29.08]
Ned: Chris, you brought a detailed post by someone who compared... Well, they didn't compare, but they did a full cost breakdown of running... What cluster was it? Some form of cluster in AWS, and it was disturbing how much it cost to run that cluster, but we don't have time to get into it. So maybe that's next time.

[00:38:50.19]
Chris: I mean, it just proves our point and that we're super Ninja geniuses, and everybody should listen to us when they make any type of life decision, personal or professional. It's phenomenal.

[00:39:00.17]
Ned: Indeed. Hey, thanks for listening or something. I guess you found it worthwhile enough if you made it all the way to the end. So congratulations to you, friend. You accomplished something today. Now you can go sit on the couch, fire up your own personal email server, and have it immediately get shut down by your ISP. You've earned it. You can find more about the show by visiting our LinkedIn page. Just search Chaos Lever or go to the website chaoslever. Com, where you'll find show notes, blog posts, and general Tom Foulery. We'll be back next week to see what fresh hell is upon us. Hata for now.

[00:39:30.08]
Chris: And remember, if you're ever making pasta sauce and you find a mushroom that's under the stove, just go ahead and throw it in. Roll the dice.

[00:39:48.01]
Ned: I'm sure it's going to be fine.

[00:39:50.01]
Chris: It's called flavor.

[00:39:53.15]
Ned: I didn't know umami rhymed with food poisoning.