4 ms·

Most $10MM ARR startups are running on two medium T class aws instances behind a load balancer at $35/mo plus another small server for accessories (redis, messa

Most $10MM ARR startups are running on two medium T class aws instances behind a load balancer at $35/mo plus another small server for accessories (redis, message queue, etc) and then a sql backend. That's something like $200/mo for infrastructure, you never need to maintain the hardware and you have the option to autoscale at any time to support $100MM ARR. Plus you get access to backups and all the other tools and products that are constantly being released. Not having to hire an IT guy at $1200/mo to maintain your physical server and tend to it's networking rules is a significant savings over a developer-managed aws/gcp instance. Plus all the cloud interfaces are standardized so you can just hire someone to come through and fix/upgrade your infrastructure. Using a home-spun physical server means months if not years of undocumented tech debt for the next guy who comes along to have to maintain whatever kludges were installed long before he/she ever showed up. I just got done converting a bunch of physical servers over to the cloud and spent a year unwinding seven years of technical debt and now the dev/qa teams can actually spin up a new test environment in under 30 days (closer to 3 minutes).

true_religion 7y ago
You’re telling me that 10 million dollar “startup” companies can’t run 1 server without incurring “years” of tech debt? Sorry, that just sounds unbelievable.
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  Welcome to startup fallacies. You don't know what you don't know, and it's easier (but not cheaper) to follow a crowd.
- philjohn 7y ago
  They can, but let's be honest, people will be doing multiple roles when in the very early stage, so your lead programmer will be configuring the server ... probably won't be using a configuration management solution and whomever takes it over is going to have to comb through the various configuration files to work out what it's meant to be doing.
social_quotient 7y ago
$200/mm for a 10MM ARR company. Can you add more info here. What sort of app/company are we taking about here? Genuinely curious
- hadlock 7y ago
  For production, $200/mo. Dev/testing seem to always cost 3x+ what production servers cost. One was an IT management/automation SAAS company (I think they were $450/mo), another was backoffice SAAS company (I think they were $1000/mo but they were also hosting for an independent dealer of their SAAS so it was two production systems, and 10 years of tech debt), third is a live video consultancy SAAS that outsourced their video to a third party api service. None of those are actually $200/mo but realistically in the ballpark of under $1000/mo. When I converted the company (which included 40 engineers and probably 12 qa engineers) to the cloud I got my hands slapped for converting the QA/test datacenter (not production) and the cost went from $3200/mo on bare metal to $6500/mo but we were able to squeeze that down to $4200/mo running about 10 always-on test/pre-prod environments and 2-3 on-demand test environments. This is all enterprise space stuff where the utilization is low but the value of the service is high. If you're doing facebook for dogs and trying to turn a profit on ad revenue from high utilization it's probably not as effective/realistic.
  - brianwawok 7y ago
    B2B generally has a lot more cost in support / handholding, and B2C has much more cost in servers. The extreme examples are a B2B app with 100 or less total users vs an imgur clone with millions of users

true_religion 7y ago

You’re telling me that 10 million dollar “startup” companies can’t run 1 server without incurring “years” of tech debt? Sorry, that just sounds unbelievable.

toomuchtodo 7y ago
Welcome to startup fallacies. You don't know what you don't know, and it's easier (but not cheaper) to follow a crowd.
philjohn 7y ago
They can, but let's be honest, people will be doing multiple roles when in the very early stage, so your lead programmer will be configuring the server ... probably won't be using a configuration management solution and whomever takes it over is going to have to comb through the various configuration files to work out what it's meant to be doing.

social_quotient 7y ago

$200/mm for a 10MM ARR company. Can you add more info here. What sort of app/company are we taking about here? Genuinely curious

hadlock 7y ago
For production, $200/mo. Dev/testing seem to always cost 3x+ what production servers cost. One was an IT management/automation SAAS company (I think they were $450/mo), another was backoffice SAAS company (I think they were $1000/mo but they were also hosting for an independent dealer of their SAAS so it was two production systems, and 10 years of tech debt), third is a live video consultancy SAAS that outsourced their video to a third party api service. None of those are actually $200/mo but realistically in the ballpark of under $1000/mo. When I converted the company (which included 40 engineers and probably 12 qa engineers) to the cloud I got my hands slapped for converting the QA/test datacenter (not production) and the cost went from $3200/mo on bare metal to $6500/mo but we were able to squeeze that down to $4200/mo running about 10 always-on test/pre-prod environments and 2-3 on-demand test environments. This is all enterprise space stuff where the utilization is low but the value of the service is high. If you're doing facebook for dogs and trying to turn a profit on ad revenue from high utilization it's probably not as effective/realistic.
- brianwawok 7y ago
  B2B generally has a lot more cost in support / handholding, and B2C has much more cost in servers. The extreme examples are a B2B app with 100 or less total users vs an imgur clone with millions of users