[adrianpike]

For us it was more like a 10x, but a few things went into that: - We found screamin' deals on hardware by snatching it up when it was available, not when we needed it. - We were at a fairly cheap colo, and haggled hard to get the cheapest rack possible. We went on a tour, noticed they had _tons_ of empty racks, and used that as some leverage. - We didn't add any additional ops overhead by having everyone responsible for ops.

We were in the 5k/month ballpark for EC2, and cut it to under $600 with a few grand outlay for hardware spread over the course of a quarter.

That said, all of my current projects are on EC2 for the provisioning flexibility, and because I hate having to drive down to a datacenter at 4AM to swap a drive.

[saurik]

Please tell me that you were including the cost of you driving to the datacenter at 4AM to swap a drive in the cost of the hardware in your price comparisons, as if you are just talking about the cost of the raw hardware and are not including the opportunity cost of all this time and energy spent haggling and performing maintenance, then this is simply a dishonest comparison: you could easily have been spending that time doing just about anything else, from working on new features for your product to improving your sales/investment pitch to simply sleeping (which will improve the quality of all of your work the next day). I'm also curious what your replacement plan is: are you intending to do this again next year, or are you intending to wait until all of your hardware starts failing and the operational overhead starts becoming painful? Finally, "having everyone responsible for ops" might mean that you didn't have to add a new explicit hire, but you can't claim that that isn't overhead: that is now state that everyone has to keep in their head and is a liability that could cause anyone to randomly get interrupted; it might even be cheaper in the long term to hire a new, more dedicated person than to reuse existing people.