[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.