$5k/month was 25% of his pods, so the total was ≈$20k/month. It's entirely possible that self hosting would cost much more than that, particularly as they wouldn't be able to save costs by scaling down.
Yeah. My dad had told me more than one horror story of early tech startups buying truckloads of hardware to scale way beyond demand growth. And I remember when getting on Slashdot meant your service would inevitably go down.
Of course, given stable demand and known requirements, bare metal can be a great option. But it’s not strictly better than public cloud hosting.
I think it’s just been long enough that people have forgotten the limitations of bare metal engineering.
> I think it’s just been long enough that people have forgotten the limitations of bare metal engineering.
Not just engineering, but deploying it too. I'm building a whole business around deploying it based at least partially on the fact that it has been forgotten. I've just been doing it long enough that I remember how to do it and it isn't getting any easier as the need for compute grows into even more complex and powerful hardware.
Disclaimer: Checkly founder.