[mattbeckman]

Our small team spends roughly $40-50k/mo at AWS. If you're just hosting a website with a SQL database (glorified LAMP stack), you're probably in it for the wrong reasons. Stick to a dedicated box or DigitalOcean etc.

AWS is like co-locating your hardware, and then the data center having 1000s of employees offering highly reliable services you can access from your infrastructure that lets you move WAY faster for things that are hard to do.

e.g. Discussion today was increasing log retention. 10 years ago I would have run the numbers, extended some SAN volumes, considered procuring more NetApp shelves, etc.

Today it's simply a cost question: is it worth it to us to store those logs for 10x longer? Sure? Ok, done.

[busterarm]

I think the point that you're making here is subtle and that people are missing it.

Your small team can _comfortably manage_ 50k/mo worth of AWS resources. That's _INCREDIBLE_.

I think people mistakenly think that cloud costs only go up exponentially and that costs are an unmanageable mess.

I've worked with teams with hundreds of engineers serving a major enterprise and only an AWS bill 3-5x yours. And they only had a small team managing it all. Comfortably.

To do similar with physical servers requires a massive stack of people and salaries. The ongoing recruiting costs to maintain staffing would dwarf what the AWS bill is.

[apple4ever]

> To do similar with physical servers requires a massive stack of people and salaries. The ongoing recruiting costs to maintain staffing would dwarf what the AWS bill is.

No no they wouldn't. Number of people is equal for both, its just different tasks they have to do.

[busterarm]

I do both at roughly 10^5 scale and I'm telling you that operating in the cloud lets us operate with an order of magnitude less people.