Carolina Cloud – One third the cost of AWS for data science workloads
12 comments
·December 14, 2025tomhow
We’ve removed the Show HN designation for now because it’s not clear that this is something people can play with without paying anything.
If it is possible/easy, please indicate in a reply to me, and we can update the title and post.
Of course it’s still fine to be on the front page of HN if the community finds it interesting. But Show HN is meant to be about showcasing an interesting project you’ve built (with a focus on technology discovery) rather than announcing a product people can buy.
tianqi
I'm very interested in your product. However, I'd like to report a strange phenomenon: whenever I open your website's homepage, although it doesn't seem to use a lot of memory, my Chrome becomes extremely laggy, and afterwards my entire Mac OS becomes very slow. The first time I encountered this, I couldn't determine the cause. I closed all applications and rebooted my computer. After working perfectly for a while, I reopened your website, and my Chrome and OS became almost unresponsive. After rebooting my computer again, without opening any other applications, just Chrome and your website, and it immediately became nearly unresponsive again. Therefore, while I'm not entirely sure, it seems highly related to your website.
leetrout
I looked around for reasonable datacenter colo in the triad and triangle and didn't get anything promising. Where are you physically hosting your infra?
Curious if you are having to buy bandwidth as well. Some of the Midwest data centers include over 30TB of bandwidth in the rack rentals.
And if you are willing to go into the details curious how you are handling bare metal provisioning. MaaS or home grown tooling? Or are you just installing proxmox by hand?
Onavo
Why would they need to buy bandwidth? Many places would offer you a gigabit pipe directly.
tcdent
Can I attach multiple GPUs to a container?
johnhamlin
Love seeing NC on HN. Go Heels!
Lucasoato
If you’re looking for a cheap but reliable alternative, Hetzner offers i7 64GB Ram servers for as low as 37.45€/month.
Of course you’re not in AWS, forget about all the managed services, but we’re talking about 95%~98% cheaper egress costs, with 20TB included in most machines.
handfuloflight
I'll bite. How much capacity do you have or some examples of the capacity you're managing?
brudgers
we're 1/3 the price
How will you provide high quality service and reliability while competing on price with the scale and financial might of AWS?
Because in B2B, those things tend to have a higher value than initial cost. Or to put it another way, your customers will be making long term investments by choosing you.
Successfully competing on price in a commodity market requires cheaper access to resources and because price is the easiest way to segment a market, low prices attract price sensitive customers...they are the least desirable customers. Good luck.
bojangleslover
You are right for probably 60% of customers. For someone spending $3k/mo on cloud on a company doing $500k/yr of revenue then going down to $1k/mo on cloud for a less tried and true product (us) is likely a bad idea.
Similarly for a mom-and-pop bakery (contrived example) hosting a website for $60/mo, going down to $20/mo (just to keep the 1/3 ratio) also is probably not worth it.
But some of our customers are not like that. For example a hedge fund we have been working with needs 512G RAM and 256 vCPUs for a mortgage model. The data size is not too big and once they get their results they rip it back to on-prem. The complexity is low, ie they just ssh in and do their models. Often they let them run over the weekend.
And these guys are very price-sensitive. In their industry, saving money means more carry for partners and bigger bonuses for quants. These guys are counting nickels.
So I think you're totally right for the large part of the market that we're not really for, and we're not really competing for those types of customers. But we're not really providing much managed service, we're providing a commodity that, assuming you don't need the high-complexity ecosystem surrounding it, can be very nice for customers who are price-sensitive.
jammo
Have you found any customers who are too price sensitive for you? Presumably at some point it is cheaper to go and rent bare metal.
cyberax
Nice! I'm definitely going to try you for our testing infrastructure.
We're Carolina Cloud - managed data science infrastructure at ~1/3 the cost of AWS.
I left my job earlier this year after watching companies get crushed by cloud bills for workloads that didn't need hyperscaler complexity. Some examples from my previous life: - $1k/month for a basic 16 vCPU VM - $50k/month for a high-RAM instance - Over $1k/month for notebook platform start-stop execution
We built Carolina Cloud for data scientists and small teams who need serious compute without the sticker shock. Our sweet spot: if you're running VMs, notebooks, or RStudio and not deeply tied to AWS/Azure/GCP service ecosystems, we can save you a lot of money.
What we offer: - Standard Ubuntu VMs - One-click Marimo notebooks - One-click RStudio Server and Shiny hosting - S3-compatible object storage (launching soon) - Prepay discounts for commitments as short as 2 weeks - SOC2-certified, HIPAA-compliant datacenter in Charlotte, NC
Simple pricing: $0.005/vCPU/hr, $0.005/GiB RAM/hr, and $0.0001/GiB of hot storage/hr on AMD EPYC Turin processors. A 32 vCPU, 128GB RAM instance runs ~$240/month vs $800+ on AWS.
We're not trying to replicate every AWS service - if you need Lambda + Secrets Manager + S3 with pre-signed URLs, stick with AWS. But if you're a hedge fund running backtests, a biotech team analyzing genomics data, or a researcher who just needs a beefy VM without surprise egress fees, we're 1/3 the price.
Check us out at console.carolinacloud.io - happy to answer questions about our infrastructure, pricing, or why we think there's room for regional clouds built on owned hardware.