Singapore software vendor says own hardware in colo costs $400M less than cloud

When you consider that 2U size servers with 128 cores and 2TB of RAM are now a commodity thing you can buy for not a totally absurd price, you can serve a real metric shitload of end-user-facing https content and applications from literally one item of hardware now.

I'm not saying put all your stuff on literally one box, but colocation space for even a really high traffic thing might not exceed something like 1 44U cabinet on the west coast (Hillsboro), 1 cabinet in Chicago, and 1 cabinet in northern VA or in a NJ datacenter.

@dang: the original blog post by Ahrefs is much more informative and detailed.

https://tech.ahrefs.com/how-ahrefs-saved-us-400m-in-3-years-...

This is kinda obvious, isn't it.

Companies have made this observation for years: cloud is very expensive compared to self-hosting. However,

* you do not have to spend a large amount of money upfront

* cloud's provisioning time is very short

* cloud's automated management requires way less man-power to operate

From the caveat at the end of the original article:

> This article doesn’t take into account other aspects that would make the comparison even more complicated. These include people skills, financial controls, cash flow, capacity planning depending on the load type, etc.

You can't handwave all this away in real life though. If you're rolling your own data center, the engineering time you need to put into managing servers, upgrades, hardware replacements, 24/7 oncall rotations etc etc is considerable and will often dwarf the costs of the hardware itself, particularly at startup scale. With a cloud provider, it's (almost) all abstracted away.

They article notes that it’s unclear whether the analysis considers discounts from reserved instances, but then brushes it off. Considering that reserved instances save about 40%, that is a huge deal.

Next, the comparison doesn’t seem to account for the cost of personnel to maintain the self-hosted infrastructure, not to mention the replicate the security and other layers of infrastructure management that are built into AWS.

Next, Singapore sits atop at least 5 different pan-Pacific cables. They are connected to HK, Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam, etc. So this company uniquely benefits from redundancy that other companies not in Sing may not enjoy.

That said, I wouldn’t put all my eggs in region basket, let alone one DC! It doesn’t say, but it doesn’t appear that the analysis includes the cost of maintaining a subsidiary company in another region for HA.

Basically, this analysis, or at least the reporting of it, leaves a LOT to be desired. As it is, it is just a fluff piece that lets you see what you want to see. If you don’t like cloud, it confirms your bias. If you like cloud, the article looks like junk you can ignore.