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by carson 5135 days ago
You are just counting EC2 cost. The AWS cost for 410TB of S3 storage is around $39k. You would need to add in BW cost on top of that.

It is also interesting that they seem to be using Akamai for a CDN instead of Cloudfront so not a completely AWS based solution.

I wish they went into what they are storing in S3. 410TB is a lot of storage. My initial guess was cached images but 80M objects breaks down to 5MB per object and that is a lot more than what is needed for image caching.
2 comments
kitsune_ 5135 days ago
From these figures they seem to burn over 100k per month on outsourced cloud services alone. Holy shit.
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tomwaddington 5135 days ago
If they're at 30+ staff, they've managed to keep hosting to a pretty small chunk of total budget.
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tnash 5135 days ago
Yeah...that's insane. Since they're a "pre-revenue" company, they're just burning money.
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moe 5135 days ago
"Burning" seems like an understatement.

Looks like a switch to dedicated hardware would amortize within... 3 months.

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teyc 5135 days ago
Given their growth rates and cash in the bank, and the fact it is still looking for a business model, it is probably better for them to focus on their key problems before working on other issues. If they were self funded, like 37signals, and are running operations where they'd tighten the screws on cost, then the focus is different again.
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moe 5135 days ago
I disagree.

Yes, they obviously have quite a few loose screws (read: whoever invested 100MM in that).

Either way, this is not a matter of "tightening". It's a matter of hiring an admin and having him not only pay for himself after 3 months, but for 1-2 other employees, too.

Yes, when you have 100MM in the bank then a mundane couple dozen thousand dollars a month might seem to matter less. But I can't think of a company where that kind of decadence has led to anything positive in the mid term.

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teoruiz 5135 days ago
That's actually right, S3 costing at $39k/month seems completely crazy.

No wonder 37signals decided to switch to their self-hosted storage solution[1].

[1] http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2483-nuts-bolts-storage

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PanMan 5135 days ago
As they just raised 100 million, I wonder if putting (a lot of) effort in replicating S3's functions to save part of 40K/month is worth the trouble. And setting that up won't be free either. (their 100 million can pay for the current storage for 200 years...)
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