[inconceivable]

i ran a hosting company. a successful one that made money for years. it made me millions of dollars.

i knew it was time to sell when prospective customers literally couldn't believe our prices. they thought we were full of shit, and accused us of being amateurs, fly-by-night scammers. and our prices weren't low - they just weren't insanely inflated like public cloud. we didn't deliberately try to undercut anyone on our quotes. it just started happening one day.

of course we raised our quotes to test the market but then they became too expensive for what we offered. lol. lmao. okay. as you can imagine running infrastructure is something people do not take lightly, so this is an uphill battle all the way. once you have no service or price edge the game is up.

so anyway, long story short, i can take a hint. i'm not nearly as smart as jeff bezos so it was time to gtfo of dodge. luckily with those 0% interest rates we found a buyer and anyone stuck in public cloud hell due to their own incompetence can kiss my ass because we fuckin' told you so.

[Buttons840]

Sounds like customers were saying "the price seem suspicious", but what they were really thinking (and maybe they didn't even realize it themselves) is "I don't trust this company because it isn't one of the 5 that runs everything else in my life".

[crazygringo]

I don't get it. Surely there was a middle ground where prices weren't so low customers didn't think you were running a scam, but weren't so high they became "too expensive for what we offered"?

What you're describing doesn't seem to be anything unique to cloud; it's something every business deals with. Figuring out the right market segmentation to deliver cheaper prices to those who are more price-conscious, and more functionality to those who can pay.

[inconceivable]

> Figuring out the right market segmentation to deliver cheaper prices to those who are more price-conscious, and more functionality to those who can pay.

yeah smart guy, that's what we did for over 10 years. then it became impossible (because it's AMZN and MSFT and GOOG, remember???). then i sold. now i never have to worry about that shit ever again.

[crazygringo]

No need to be snarky/insulting here. It was just that your explanation purely on prices being either too low or too high seems incomplete. It's not clear why there wasn't a middle ground.

On the other hand, not being able to compete against the scale of major cloud providers makes sense. It's just not clear how that's related to you starting out with prices that were too low.

[pphysch]

Can you give a ballpark figure by what factor AWS/Azure TCO exceeded yours?

[inconceivable]

to keep it simple, think of a 42u rack stuffed to the gills with servers and switches.

that would cost us maybe $10k a month on the margin, and we could resell and manage it for nearly $50k a month. i'm betting amazon could milk it for $200k a month, possibly 2-3x that if it's GPU's.