# Amazon RDS

50 Hacker News commenters recommended Amazon RDS and 43 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 11 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Managed Postgres and MySQL database that handles backups, replicas and upgrades so you don't run it yourself. Critics say it costs far more than renting a server and is slower.

## Why people recommend it

- Managed backups and point-in-time recovery (5 comments): "it adds a lot of value - scalability, a reasonably optimized config, backups I don't have to worry about." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48083860)) "battle-tested infrastructure for HA, backup and restores, point-in-time recovery, read replicas" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49009624)) "The first step I do when I do any meaningful side project is to set up rds with snapshots." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48145042))
- Saves time on upkeep and ops (6 comments): "db hosting is something that makes me nervous and I end up just leaving it to RDS etc." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48024789)) "using RDS or Supabase saves weeks of time on upgrades, replicas, tuning, and backups" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46341239)) "I do not want that responsibility, especially because I know how badly it turns out" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46341812))
- Easy high availability and scaling (5 comments): "read auto scaling is huge in Serverless: you can have new read replica nodes auto-launch in response to e.g. a wave of concurrent, massive reporting queries" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46337725)) "battle-tested infrastructure for HA, backup and restores, point-in-time recovery, read replicas" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49009624)) "On RDS you can get an HA replica (or cluster) by clicking a radio box." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46345517))
- Integrates with other AWS services (4 comments): "RDS gets you easy integration with the rest of the AWS services, which as a startup, you’re probably using quite a few of." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49016004)) "I concur on RDS, Terraform for IAC, and FaaS whenever possible." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47082117)) "Use EC2, EBS, S3, Route53 plus EKS, RDS, ElastiCache." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48449248))

## What people warn about

- Costs more than self-hosting (7 comments): "a self-hosted PostgreSQL on a bare metal server with NVMe SSDs will much faster than what RDS is capable of" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46337487)) "Why pay $1050/month on AWS RDS when a Herzner dedicated server costs $55 a month and offers more resources?" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48897558)) "the price difference between the bare machines vs RDS usually aren't enough to pay for another person" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47086717))
- Limits on query performance and IO (4 comments): "If you're on AWS the answer is fairly simple because it boils down to what IO capacity you are willing to pay for." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46894918)) "We run ~25kqps average & mostly things are fine, but when on-call pages come in query performance is a common culprit." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46365430)) "a self-hosted PostgreSQL on a bare metal server with NVMe SSDs will much faster than what RDS is capable of" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46337487))
- Outages, bugs and upgrade surprises (3 comments): "Strangely, what version I needed to upgrade to from 8.0 was not stated anywhere in the mass of emails Amazon sent me." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46131796)) "I've had an RDS instance fail in an equally-weird way that required manual AWS operator intervention 24 hours later" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46597644)) "they killed a postgres on RDS instance (AWS bug!) and couldn't google or LLM their way out of it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50054652))
- Less visibility and control (2 comments): "except now they are stuck trying to maintain and debug Postgres without having the same visibility and agency" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46337393)) "why not allow RDS to load up extension binaries from an S3 bucket and call it a day?" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46446324))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Neon Postgres](https://hackerapproved.com/p/neon.md): 48 recommend
- [DynamoDB](https://hackerapproved.com/p/amazon-dynamodb.md): 46 recommend
- [Cloudflare D1](https://hackerapproved.com/p/cloudflare-d1.md): 36 recommend
- [PlanetScale](https://hackerapproved.com/p/planetscale.md): 33 recommend
- [Amazon Aurora](https://hackerapproved.com/p/amazon-aurora.md): 23 recommend

## Where to get it

- [Visit the official site](https://aws.amazon.com/rds/)

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Amazon RDS", https://hackerapproved.com/p/amazon-rds/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).