Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ChuckMcM 4115 days ago
It is interesting coming at it from the other side, I get hit up all the time to move my infrastructure to the cloud, I give them the specs and what I pay per month, tell them that if they can beat it I'll switch. The closest anyone has come has been about 4x the cost I'm currently paying.

But I note that I have a unique case that isn't covered by the cloud "architecture" (crawling the web and indexing it). Explaining that it is "ok" if I am in the 10% not covered by your 90% solution. But sales folks never like to hear that.
1 comments
jzawodn 4115 days ago
Yeah, it's always fun when I tell someone at we're 100% self-hosted too. They never stop to think that traffic, load, and usage patterns on craigslist are pretty well understood at this point. Plus it's certainly cheaper than paying someone else to run all your hardware. You get to pick your peers, pick your hardware, and allocate as you see fit.
link
AndyNemmity 4115 days ago
It's cheaper if you have a good team, which it sounds like you do.

A ton of places don't have a good team, and the cost numbers end up being a lot closer.

A great team will destroy Cloud margins. An Average-Bad team will fall in line, plus you don't have to run the team anymore.

link
rdeboo 4115 days ago
Your comment makes sense, but it implies Netflix does not have a great team, or that it has other considerations than pure financial ones?
link
jamiesonbecker 4115 days ago
I've had many clients on AWS rack up six-figure monthly bills unnecessarily simply because they didn't realize how to design for cost.. it's not a silver bullet. Those penny fractions add up fast. There are a lot of tricks to save money.
link
brongondwana 4114 days ago
We run into this at FastMail all the time as well. For the one customer who needed "their own gear" we built out on SoftLayer for much the same reasons as the article - real hardware where you need it.

But our operations costs are so much lower than renting that we could replace all our hardware every year and still break even.

(yeah, we could get SoftLayer to refresh our hardware every year as well, but we don't need it refreshed that fast, and at the end we still own the hardware)

link