Agreed.

With that $230k/year you’d have to hire more engineers to maintain the servers in addition to the normal day to day stuff they would be doing more quickly in AWS.

You’d also have to simply find engineers who are willing to work on that platform. I personally would not. If someone else out there is willing to figure out the details on pxe booting or the ipmi differences across vendors or hacking snmp data from a switch into a modern monitoring stack, good luck to them. Those days are behind me though. I’m never going back.

You don’t get that much “security”, though. You’re still responsible for actually securing all your applications and infrastructure components.

Also, this is a question of scale, just like with any make or buy decision. AWS isn’t magic, it’s just servers. For a small company, it makes sense to buy servers as a service, but at a certain scale, it stops making sense. This is no different from buying screws versus making your own screws.

“We saved $xxx by buying our own car instead of paying taxi every time.”.

They barely touched on the time and money spent managing bare metal. I’d imagine that 230k a year is gonna get a big ol dent in it when their assumption of “modern servers make maintenance needs much lower” turns out to be false.

All for not hosting in AWS but I want to see one of these articles put out actual numbers about what it looks like to run. I want the we are two years into this and have learned X, Y, and Z post. And one that isn’t written by DHH

They say their monthly op-ex is $5500.

Our monthly operational expenditure (op-ex), which includes power, cooling, energy, and remote hands (although we seldom use this service), is now approximately $5,500.