7% on hosting revenue sounds like a great accomplishment but what's relatively a good ratio to look at?

So what is normal in the SaaS world? I am at 5% today, and I try but not focus on costs. Around 5% it seems hard to care TOO much...

We're at ~10% and are just starting to care. We're looking at some infrastructure changes to bring us closer to 4%.

Well it makes sense to care more as you grow for sure.

Shaving 6% off a 10k a month company is $600 which is nice but not a game changer. Shaving 6% off a $1 mil a month company is $60k a month, which is a nice bonus for someone...

Adding a data point: we're at 1.5% for 6 figure monthly revenue.

That seems very good. Are you on a popular cloud (AWS/GCE/Azure), colocated, or running your own servers?

AWS

We're just over 2%, all in AWS costs.

What revenue range (5 fig, 6 fig?)

While, as others have pointed out, that with 100k non-paying users the $1,600 figure makes more sense. Your example still makes no sense to me, what are you _actually_ doing with all that server power?

Can't speak for xstartup, but if the dataset is 100+ GB then EBS, S3, etc start to cost real money. I host an application on AWS for a single customer with 10 active users which costs about $1500/month because there are several TBs of data and the nature of the application needs a lot of CPU and RAM. In other words, it depends on the use case and data size.

What? I have a 16TB raid that only costs 800$ a month. You should look into how you store that information.

Or stop making assumptions with very little information. That is really my point, but I didn't think it needed to be said explicitly.

I've seen burnt coffee that was roasted less than this.

Yep, that's right. We've not investigated cloud costs at all. If only, I get to have some calm days when my hair is not on fire. Maybe I just suck at development or need to hire really good dev ops team. For now, just single developer.

I've read a good book that taught me some good ways of managing time. 7 Habits of Highly Effective people

We just have really low latency requirements which matter to the customers we serve. And several TBs of clickstream data on which we perform real-time analytics. This is why we rewrote the main request server entirely in Go while we kept the frontend API in Ruby.