[patio11]

If the hosting costs are high because of inefficient software, or bad architecture decisions, then those should be changed.

If anyone here believes this, make your best estimate as to how many man-months you need for a re-architecture and how many hundreds of dollars you'll save in hosting costs, then do the division to get your effective hourly rate. I'll pay you that plus 50% for contract programming work.

[mibbit]

In the example, the current hosting is $24k/yr. If that can be slashed to $2.4k/yr, you've saved $21.6k a year in hosting.

For $21.6k/yr I'd say it's worth a week or two re-architecting.

Yes, it's a different game if you're profitable and $21.6k is negligible, but if you're a startup you should be spending time to optimize things.

The other point is one of scaling. If you're paying $2k/mo to support 15k users, when you scale to 15m users, you could be paying $2m/mo unless you fix things early on.

[adambyrtek]

What makes you think that in "a week or two" you are able to cut costs by a factor of ten without sacrificing performance and reliability?

[mattmanser]

Well, there's a lot of people here expressing surprise at the cost of hosting a small user base of simple data in a not complicated problem domain.

It looks an order of magnitude too expensive to us, there's probably some simple thing wrong in the architecture.

Maybe we're all missing a key complexity of the service. The Archival service might be it.

[jarek]

I'm imagining the full text search of the archive to be a factor, but then again I don't know much about search.