Considering that pof.com used to run on a single server and handled more dating traffic than all of its competitors combined, you can go pretty damn far for peanuts.
Folks that come from over funded and over engineered companies don’t know this. Because they haven’t experienced it, it’s simply not possible to them. If you have money to burn, you do so.
My company has grown 15x in the last few years and our total infra costs continue to go down, because we pay attention to them.
Every posting about one of the larger scale companies have to have a “why does it cost x / take y engineers to run this thing?” comment. It’s like everyone at google / Facebook / Amazon are too stupid to realize they can run the entire thing out of a server in the basement maintained by 5 engineers.
If it was so simple to host Instagram for peanuts I wonder why no one has done it.
Hard to abstract away the money that it'll cost - which is the original point here. They're doing something that costs money, and people want to use that something, so they're doing what it takes to make money from it.
AWS makes around 26% margins (not broken out, it’s markets best guess). At a medium size it can make more cost effect sense to run your own……with the understanding that you have to build a cattle farm, and pets are forbidden. If you every allow a pet, then just go to AWS, et.al.
In fact: I'm sure there are many cat image sharing sites out there. A random search landed me here: https://www.funnycatpix.com/_pics/Hmmmmmm890.htm
Seems like a high-quality HN-like website, hehe :)