Ahrefs saved $400m in 3 years by not going to the cloud • Hacker News Board

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

#101

Post by debarshri » Fri, Mar 10, 2023, 6:50 PM UTC

KyeRussell wrote: post #40

debarshri wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I feel like you’ve used a dishonest interpretation of this comment to push back against it and flex that you know what this company does? The only person ther said “just” is you. And “large Hadoop clusters” can be the most resource-intensive component of their infrastructure, but not necessarily the company’s value-add, or where most of their effort goes. Stop being adversarial.

It is my mistake. I'm sorry. I have misinterpreted it.

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

#102

Post by hinkley » Fri, Mar 10, 2023, 6:50 PM UTC

hotpotamus wrote: post #28

VWWHFSfQ wrote: 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.

It’s the new kid on an old block.

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

#103

Post by hinkley » Fri, Mar 10, 2023, 6:55 PM UTC

bastawhiz wrote: post #58

Ahrefs could probably save another few hundred million if they didn't repeatedly visit the same links over and over indefinitely to find the same error codes or a binary file that they surely don't care about. I see them in my logs for my podcast hosting service, hitting the same 404s for months and months. They end up hitting audio files and downloading (or attempting to download) many gigabytes of content each day.…

I cannot express emphatically enough how powerful the concept of classes of service can be for simplifying your production issues.

I think people see the notion of a network neutrality as an all or nothing thing. Network Neutrality between networks, yes, but within your racks you’re trying to balance a large equation instead of two or three smaller ones.

If they reclassified sketchy pages they wouldn’t have nearly as much of the sorts of trouble you mention.

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

#104

Post by manv1 » Fri, Mar 10, 2023, 7:02 PM UTC

warent wrote: post #99

manv1 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it depends on the colo. I mean, it's not like a colo doesn't have issues. At one point our colo was running some cable and we discovered that their cables to our rack were wiggly...after our stuff went offline intermittently. That was hard to track down. And you need to set up the LOMs, the management network (hey, you don't want that on the public internet), VPN, serial cables (backup to network LOM), maybe a…

These are great points, thank you for the insight. A small note I will add is that these days there are remote BIOS options available for servers like iDRAC

Do they need a reboot to take effect? I haven't touched a LOM in more than 8 years!

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

#105

Post by oxfordmale » Fri, Mar 10, 2023, 7:05 PM UTC

hinkley wrote: post #98

oxfordmale wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buying your own server requires an upfront investment. AS 90% of start-ups fail, hiring your computing resource flexibly is far better, even if it comes at a higher cost. Once your company is mature and relatively stable, it is worth considering if hosting your infrastructure is more cost-effective.

But now you have a culture that has no experience or value with self hosted hardware. How are you going to fix that cultural problem? Hire a bunch of outsiders? How’s that gonna fly?

Bringing your infrastructure from Cloud to on-perm is a project; you would have to hire a dedicated team. Once you have proven your start-up is providing a genuine solution, it is a lot easier to get funding for this.

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

#106

Post by hotpotamus » Fri, Mar 10, 2023, 7:17 PM UTC

manv1 wrote: post #96

hotpotamus wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, the "actual" way to use cloud is to undergo a major re-write of your application such that it is inextricably tied into the proprietary PaaS options of your cloud provider. Cloud is amazing for highly variable loads. I also see it as a bit of a luxury service for ops types (like me) - I don't have to go to a DC and manage hardware or deal with a DCops crew, so that's nice, but you probably wouldn't buy luxury…

Let's face it, fear of vendor lock-in is almost always bullshit. Everyone's locked into a vendor at some level or another. Want to move off of Oracle? It's work. Want to move off of servers and into VMs? It's work. Do you want to move off of some Java library like Spring? It's work. Even moving from apache to nginx is work (assuming you're not just serving static files). Your technology choices always lock you in. Yo…

I'd say there is a difference between technical path-dependence/tech debt, and a vendor who's actively able to take technical and legal steps to try and compel you to keep using their services. And obviously you should be getting something for the lock-in, otherwise you're setting money on fire for no reason. The fear is what happens once you are well and truly boxed in - somehow IBM still sells a bunch of mainframes, for instance. (Maybe they're truly amazing machines still; I know nothing about that world).

I do spend a fair amount of time and effort trying to keep my company nimble; we try to use open source software and generic cloud primitives so we can move with some ease if need to. As you say, it is all work.

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

#107

Post by henriquez » Fri, Mar 10, 2023, 7:38 PM UTC

sebiandev wrote: post #92

It depends. Are these PAYGO prices or reserved instance prices? There is a HUGE difference. If these are PAYGO prices, the cost would probably be about the same to have your infra reserved in AWS WITH the added flexibility. This is why not just ANYONE should be able to spin up infrastructure in cloud providers. You should hire someone who knows what they're even doing.

He compared against AWS 3 year reserve pricing.

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

#108

Post by hotpotamus » Fri, Mar 10, 2023, 7:44 PM UTC

manv1 wrote: post #104

warent wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are great points, thank you for the insight. A small note I will add is that these days there are remote BIOS options available for servers like iDRAC

Do they need a reboot to take effect? I haven't touched a LOM in more than 8 years!

DRACs are a Dell specific term for what is generically known as IPMI or out of band management. They were quite well developed when I worked on servers well over a decade ago now. The good ones are basically as independent of the system they're attached to as possible and essentially give you the equivalent of physical access to a server.

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

#109

Post by manv1 » Fri, Mar 10, 2023, 8:06 PM UTC

hotpotamus wrote: post #108

manv1 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they need a reboot to take effect? I haven't touched a LOM in more than 8 years!

DRACs are a Dell specific term for what is generically known as IPMI or out of band management. They were quite well developed when I worked on servers well over a decade ago now. The good ones are basically as independent of the system they're attached to as possible and essentially give you the equivalent of physical access to a server.

I know what DRACs are (it's Dell's LOM). I asked whether the DRAC bios stuff required a reboot.

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

#110

Post by manv1 » Fri, Mar 10, 2023, 8:09 PM UTC

hotpotamus wrote: post #106

manv1 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's face it, fear of vendor lock-in is almost always bullshit. Everyone's locked into a vendor at some level or another. Want to move off of Oracle? It's work. Want to move off of servers and into VMs? It's work. Do you want to move off of some Java library like Spring? It's work. Even moving from apache to nginx is work (assuming you're not just serving static files). Your technology choices always lock you in. Yo…

I'd say there is a difference between technical path-dependence/tech debt, and a vendor who's actively able to take technical and legal steps to try and compel you to keep using their services. And obviously you should be getting something for the lock-in, otherwise you're setting money on fire for no reason. The fear is what happens once you are well and truly boxed in - somehow IBM still sells a bunch of mainframes…

I've never heard of AWS suing someone to keep using their services.

I wouldn't be surprised if Oracle or any outsourcer did that...but that implies a breach of contract, not a transition after a contract is done.

IBM sells mainframes because they're impossible to replace due to the way they're used. Those big printers that print financials statements apparently don't talk to anything else (funny, I was just talking about those the other day). It's about I/O and throughput with those things. You'd think someone would have come up with a replacement, but presumably the market is so small that nobody cares.