[austenallred]

When people ask, "Why does HN/the tech industry pay so much attention to the companies that are raising money?" I'll point them to this.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with bootstrapping and making a good living, but the stuff that goes big and wants to scale quickly usually has to raise a bunch of money to get there.

[petercooper]

That's true, but IMHO hosting is not a service that benefits significantly from economies of scale beyond a certain (though reasonably high) point. Would Linode be any better for me as a customer if it were immediately 3x the size? I'm not sure. As a customer, would I prefer a Linode that were 10x the size and having to head for an "exit" of some kind? No way.

[austenallred]

I'm not sure; Amazon putting data centers in glaciers or Google trying to float a ship out into the ocean to water cool it certainly seem like they could could provide either performance or prices an order of magnitude greater than what is currently available; the tricky part is building up enough steam that you can be trusted with enough cash to make that happen.

If nothing else, we all benefit from the prices. AWS is so cheap I barely have to think about it.

[brianwawok]

I mean when I think of economies of scale, I would name datacenters pretty high up on the list!

Thing of the googles and facebooks making their own servers instead of buying from off the shelf guys...

[hudj1jcnapru38]

OTOH, taking money puts pressure on a bigger exit/revenue scaling plan. To me, that means more like GoDaddy and less like prgmr, which is not what I want from my service providers.

The pressure to expand is a negative indicator when I'm a user of a service.