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Ahrefs saved $400m in 3 years by not going to the cloud

tech.ahrefs.com

21–30 of 166 posts

Re: Ahrefs saved $400m in 3 years by not going to the cloud

#21

In the last 15 years that I've seen this type of clickbait, 100% of the time it's written by someone who doesn't know how to make a TCO calculation. Of course, this time was no different. Should have saved myself the agony after reading the first sentence: "Clouds for IT infrastructure are so popular lately that moving into the cloud has become a trend.". Please.

So let us know what is wrong and how a proper TCO calculation looks like. What's missing?

Re: Ahrefs saved $400m in 3 years by not going to the cloud

#22

Pretty interesting point there at the end of the post: But with the mass layoffs in Big Tech in recent months, this may be an opportunity to re-evaluate the approach to the cloud, consider a reverse migration from the cloud, and hire seasoned professionals of the data center world. I do think with all these layoffs we can't help but see some interesting things happen from people who have been let go. Either through t…

despite what everyone thinks that doing things locally is cheaper, if you're running a business and allocating money towards headcount and benefits plus additional risk of maintaining team it rarely makes sense. HN is full of people who run a hobby server and think that a fortune 500 should manage its own PostGres

Everyone loves to run their own server in the garage until they’re on vacation in Thailand and the power goes out back home.

I actually saw a very impressive solution to that problem on an indie hacker forum recently. And wow could that person save effort with even just a $5/mo VPS.

Re: Ahrefs saved $400m in 3 years by not going to the cloud

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

despite what everyone thinks that doing things locally is cheaper, if you're running a business and allocating money towards headcount and benefits plus additional risk of maintaining team it rarely makes sense. HN is full of people who run a hobby server and think that a fortune 500 should manage its own PostGres

You still need headcount to manage systems on AWS. And not really fewer then if you would run them locally. Source: managed systems locally, am now managing systems on AWS

Surely the cloud managed solution reduces the amount of custom magic that I have to put into place to keep things running. Everything is standardized & documented. There is a huge community to turn to if help is needed.

And very less work is required if I get hit by a bus and someone else is now the owner of the huge system that I previously owned.

Re: Ahrefs saved $400m in 3 years by not going to the cloud

#24

> We use high core-count CPUs, 2TB RAM, and 2x 100Gbps per server. On average, our servers have about 16x 15TB drives. > So let’s say we run our 850 servers I'm not familiar with this company, but it says on their website We’ve been crawling the web for over 10 years, collecting and processing petabytes of data every day. , they have their own search engine (named 'Yep), provide all kinds of reports, etc. I'm guessin…

I'm familiar with the product. They help you optimize your SEO, provider serp scores, backlink health, organic keywords performance etc. Basically, everything to do with Google SEO.

I think calling them "just a bunch of hadoop cluster" might be disservice to the amount of effort that goes into building a product like this esp. When millions of digital marketing professionals use their service.

Re: Ahrefs saved $400m in 3 years by not going to the cloud

#25

This napkin math is pointless, if you're a business leader, you're going to factor in non physical costs as well, since you need a team to run hundreds of servers most likely. If business all of a sudden starts to go under, you can pull plug on cloud, but you'd have to write it off if self hosting. Hosting yourself makes sense if you're providing hardware level services like storage or compute. In that case, going to…

You still need a team to manage the stuff on AWS. Probably the team needs to be even bigger.

If you’re a business leader, you‘re probably just blindly following what your peer business leaders are doing, that’s why you’re on AWS (in most cases at least)

Re: Ahrefs saved $400m in 3 years by not going to the cloud

#26
post #21

In the last 15 years that I've seen this type of clickbait, 100% of the time it's written by someone who doesn't know how to make a TCO calculation. Of course, this time was no different. Should have saved myself the agony after reading the first sentence: "Clouds for IT infrastructure are so popular lately that moving into the cloud has become a trend.". Please.

So let us know what is wrong and how a proper TCO calculation looks like. What's missing?

Anything that you have to do "extra" compared to managing the hardware yourself.

E.g. this article is missing even basic stuff like the (prorated) salary costs of employees buying, installing and servicing the hardware.

Re: Ahrefs saved $400m in 3 years by not going to the cloud

#27

Pretty interesting point there at the end of the post: But with the mass layoffs in Big Tech in recent months, this may be an opportunity to re-evaluate the approach to the cloud, consider a reverse migration from the cloud, and hire seasoned professionals of the data center world. I do think with all these layoffs we can't help but see some interesting things happen from people who have been let go. Either through t…

despite what everyone thinks that doing things locally is cheaper, if you're running a business and allocating money towards headcount and benefits plus additional risk of maintaining team it rarely makes sense. HN is full of people who run a hobby server and think that a fortune 500 should manage its own PostGres

The performance benefits of a real DB server with local NVME and a TB+ of ram can save TONS of engineering effort/time. I have ran 10TB+ PostgreSQL DBs in both the cloud and bare metal and TBH, in terms of time required to maintain, there isn't a huge difference once you move beyond what RDS can do.

That being said, if RDS can do what you need USE IT. You can always migrate later and it will save you the need to hire someone who really knows postgres.

Re: Ahrefs saved $400m in 3 years by not going to the cloud

#28
post #3

I often fantasize about moving a bunch of my company's crap off of ECS/EKS and onto a managed colo with just old-school ansible deployments. I've even spec'd out some bare metal from our local colocation facility and the servers they offer are so ridiculously powerful and CHEAP. We could run our entire production system in a half-rack for about 10% of what we pay AWS. But alas, nobody will ever go for it and I'm left…

I had to look it up - Ansible's initial release was just over 11 years ago. Calling it "old-school" sure took me by surprise, though I suppose that is a long time in the tech world. To me, old school is doing everything via Bash or even by hand.

Re: Ahrefs saved $400m in 3 years by not going to the cloud

#30
post #3

I often fantasize about moving a bunch of my company's crap off of ECS/EKS and onto a managed colo with just old-school ansible deployments. I've even spec'd out some bare metal from our local colocation facility and the servers they offer are so ridiculously powerful and CHEAP. We could run our entire production system in a half-rack for about 10% of what we pay AWS. But alas, nobody will ever go for it and I'm left…

> "We could run our entire production system in a half-rack for about 10% of what we pay AWS" Performance. You'd also get way faster hardware too.

And very wide choice of hardware and tuning abilities. Also network config can speed up overall performance greatly.
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