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

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

#141

Post by nikau »

manv1 wrote: post #110
hotpotamus wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Every cloud vendor charges for egress but not ingress, the more data you onboard the more expensive it is to move off

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

#142

Post by nazka »

klodolph wrote: post #90
acedTrex wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you manage to run on prem infra with vms and clusters in a true cattle mindset then cloud doesnt offer you as much for sure

I’m thinking more about evolution within the space of automated configuration tools. I use Ansible at home as a replacement for the 1990s style of sysadmin where you manually managed your servers (which I did until the mid 2010s). Yet, I’m aware that Ansible is not declarative. It’s looks declarative, if you take your glasses off and don’t think too hard about it, but the key to understanding Ansible is really that t…

Why not K8s? Or other stuff?

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

#143

Post by oxfordmale »

sshine wrote: post #136
oxfordmale wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're missing several points on the spectrum. You can provision dedicated servers with Terraform. They can still be cloudy in the way you deal with hardware maintenance and risk of failure, and how you authenticate with them and how you name them, and how you hook them up on VPNs. But they're physical units without the AWS bells and whistles or the AWS premium. Not everyone needs their own colocated rack, and manage…

The main problem is OPEX versus APEX, not whether you can Terraform your infrastructure. It depends on your business model whether self-hosting is more cost effective than the Cloud. Cloud is more flexible and as a result you pay a premium, however, the cost differences are not as large as claimed in this article

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

#144

Post by oxfordmale »

botsbreeder wrote: post #134
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.

If your startup survive next 6 months it is already more cost-effective to buy a server. And if startup fails you still have a server to run your next startup.

Not necessarily.

https://www.itpro.co.uk/cloud/public-cloud/369521/singapore-...

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

#145

Post by nazka »

drcongo wrote: post #71
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.…

Ahrefs is like my white whale. I hate them. I can't stop myself from battling them. I hate the fact that they ignore status codes, I hate the fact that they ignore crawl rate specs in robots.txt, I hate the fact that they crawl URLs on my sites that have never and will never exist and keep coming back to do it again.

Why not use Semrush?

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

#146

Post by topicseed »

Symbiote wrote: post #122
topicseed wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, this sounds a lot of to do items that I don't want to do.

I think it's nice to have a completely different type of work a couple of days per year. I've found there's generally developers who are into building custom gaming PCs or Raspberry Pis or whatever who are interested to see the servers and lend a hand installing new ones.

I actually am into hacking at home but I'd definitely not play around with my business' production environment. Wouldn't know where to start if sh* hits the fan.

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

#147

Post by KomoD »

bediger4000 wrote: post #87

I kind of wish they hadn't. Ahrefs claims to be in the "SEO" business, which as far as I'm concerned, has helped ruin web search, and indeed, the culture of the web in general. Also, Ahrefs bot doesn't handle some things very well. I made an "infinite web site" in PHP a while back, and used Apache mod_rewrite to send every Ahrefs request to the infinite web site PHP program: https://github.com/bediger4000/infinite-fa…

> Ahrefs bot really freaked out, unlike some professional bots like Google's, and even Yandex' bot.

> Also, Ahrefs bot doesn't handle some things very well.

But that was... 7 years ago?

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

#148

Post by pkphilip »

Nextgrid wrote: post #138
oxfordmale wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On-Premise Indirect (Hidden) Costs There are a variety of other expenses associated with an on-premise environment considered indirect expenses. These expenses are often referred to as “hidden” expenses due to how often they are overlooked rather than “hidden.” These include: The real estate of the storage space used for the servers Tools used for temperature control in the data center The cost of set up, configurati…

Hosting providers such as Hetzner or OVH take care of all of that for you and include it into a fixed, monthly price per server. I however would like to address some of your points which I find absolutely ridiculous: > Staff salaries for administrators that maintain an on-premise data center Every cloud-native company I've been at had an entire team wrangling YAML files around. I'm not exactly sure why they had to do…

True. Also, the devops salaries are much higher than hiring a system admin to watch over your servers.

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

#149

Post by nostrebored »

sshine wrote: post #80
senttoschool wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to build PCs. You can get the same hardware for nearly half the cost of pre-built PCs like HP or Dell. I did a lot of research on the best bang for the buck parts and the most reliable parts. If something broke, just pull it out and replace it. Easy. I worked in an IT department as an intern. I thought this company should build custom PCs for all their workers. You can get a much faster CPU or much faster GPU…

> I'm sure you're very competent at managing server hardware. But if I'm a seed stage startup, I'd politely decline your offer. It’s not either AWS or “bring your soldering iron”. Self-hosting K8s on managed hardware is still insanely cheaper than AWS. GitOps, infrastructure as code, DevOps platforms, CNCF best practice setups are entirely doable without paying the Amazon tax. If your lead DevOps quits, you’re right,…

Running K8S is itself a giant tax. The complexity is absurd and the components are not as reliable as having a literal team of people who are responsible for ops and making a service feature complete.

> The last time I worked for a company that was invested in AWS, their AWS budget corresponded to five full-time senior developers in running costs.

This means nothing to me -- what is the TCO of the AWS deployment vs. the TCO of the non AWS deployment? How flexible are the different systems for the future? What are the reliability/uptime requirements and the marginal cost of outage? How replaceable are the dev ops engineers who are running your K8s/managed infra?

People moving to cloud isn't irrational. There's a reason that it's pervasive.

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

#150

Post by amluto »

senttoschool wrote: post #63
warent wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again this is the kool-aid speaking. The co-location manages most of the complexity and the probability of failure is basically zero for the first 4 years. Hardware these days is really good . People have this illusion that servers are extremely hard to maintain because big companies constantly have to maintain their 1000s, and because clouds are incentivized to sell this lie. It would still be a huge cost saving and…

I used to build PCs. You can get the same hardware for nearly half the cost of pre-built PCs like HP or Dell. I did a lot of research on the best bang for the buck parts and the most reliable parts. If something broke, just pull it out and replace it. Easy. I worked in an IT department as an intern. I thought this company should build custom PCs for all their workers. You can get a much faster CPU or much faster GPU…

In the last few years, build-your-own storage got annoying. Most server disks were SATA, mostly the same form factor and SATA ports are available in abundance. You could get various more complex SFF-xyzw connectors, but the adapters were straightforwardly available.

Now there’s NVMe and there are quite a few form factors. And NVMe is generally a point-to-point link to the CPU, so you either need a motherboard with the right number and types of connectors or you need a PCIe/NVMe splitter or switch. And the latter don’t seem widely available on the non-sketchy-hardware market.

So the situation is fine for system integrators who make their own PCBs, but not amazing for DIY builders.

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