[pcote]

>> hosting is often one of the biggest expenses for early stage companies.

I don't understand this claim, at least when it comes to services like Digital Ocean and Linode. Maybe it's a statement made out of selection bias. Yes, Ycombinator batches have had their share of hyper growth startups. Yes, hyper growth can lead to scaling challenges and expenses.

That being said, it strikes me that most early stage (or any stage for that matter) tech companies do not and may never have that kind of problem. If I had to venture a guess, the normal case for tech startups is closer to the SaaS company with a few hundred business customers. For these more common cases, it's hard to imagine server costs on Digital Ocean running much higher than what you'd see in a cable internet bill.

[zanewill9]

This is probably a leftover opinion from just a few years ago using AWS. At that time, the pricing model increased shockingly fast with AWS. I know a few startups that were caught off-guard.

AWS is far more competitive now and relatively inline with offerings from Digital Ocean and Linode.

[toomanybeersies]

The company I work at spends a lot more money on staff than hosting.

This is exactly people use Rails in startups, dev time is mminimised, at the cost of speed, and hence a requirement for more servers.