Re:Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conven...
by LeifCarrotson on Thursday May 18, 2017 @01:38PM
(#14369291)
I think there's a couple sweet spots:
At stage one, with <1000 visitors per day, I can get by on a $5/mo Digital Ocean node or $20 Linode. Just the fact that they're even numbers means I'm leaving something on the table, but just the cost per hour for talking about buying, building, and colocating my own machines is more expensive than this.
Stage two is a sweet spot where running your own 5-25 machines makes sense for stable, medium-sized, medium traffic businesses.
After that, though, stage 3 is when gets to be too much for one combination programmer/devops employee to manage in their spare time, and it makes sense to go back to the cloud and have someone else manage all of that for you. A lot of startups focused on rapid growth like to skip step 2 and go straight to this stage. When you outgrow the "do whatever's cheapest" stage of hosting, it can become untenable to explain to your investors that a few thousand in server hardware will probably be adequate for the next few years, and they'll see a nice return of a fraction of an employee per month on hosting if it's done most efficiently.
Somewhere in the stratosphere, stage 4 is when it again becomes more reasonable to hire an internal team to assemble and maintain your computing resources. Perhaps you can instead convince your investors that this is your target? After all, Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are on their own hardware...
At stage one, with <1000 visitors per day, I can get by on a $5/mo Digital Ocean node or $20 Linode. Just the fact that they're even numbers means I'm leaving something on the table, but just the cost per hour for talking about buying, building, and colocating my own machines is more expensive than this.
Stage two is a sweet spot where running your own 5-25 machines makes sense for stable, medium-sized, medium traffic businesses.
After that, though, stage 3 is when gets to be too much for one combination programmer/devops employee to manage in their spare time, and it makes sense to go back to the cloud and have someone else manage all of that for you. A lot of startups focused on rapid growth like to skip step 2 and go straight to this stage. When you outgrow the "do whatever's cheapest" stage of hosting, it can become untenable to explain to your investors that a few thousand in server hardware will probably be adequate for the next few years, and they'll see a nice return of a fraction of an employee per month on hosting if it's done most efficiently.
Somewhere in the stratosphere, stage 4 is when it again becomes more reasonable to hire an internal team to assemble and maintain your computing resources. Perhaps you can instead convince your investors that this is your target? After all, Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are on their own hardware...