"that serves a $5B/yr business."

Ok but is that static site primarily generating the $5B in revenue ? That's more relevant to know. Having a static site for a business where the revenue is generated elsewhere is not that big of a deal in my opinion. Yes I get your point that the $5B company is hosting a static site on S3 which is cool but what will be cooler is if THAT static site is the primary revenue driver. I bet it isn't.

I think it's more along the lines that a $5B/yr business would typically have gone to a large contracting firm, and the resulting solution would have been over-engineered with all of the front and back-end stuff and resulted in a higher cost to solve the same problem.

^ You got it completely. Thank you.

Actually probably the output would be worse, because there's a significant amount of domain knowledge in building an effective website in this space. The only companies that are effective at it do it in house or go to specialists in the space.

Car dealership advertising is actually extremely similar in this regard. There are just a few big players working with hundreds to thousands of dealers.

I tried to imagine what kind of website could generate $5B without requiring more than $100/month of hardware. Seems impossible.

Just take a look at the top 10 adwords keywords and let your mind wander. Our business touched 4 out of 10...

Found in a random blog post, top 10 keywords:

- Insurance

- Loans

- Mortgage

- Attorney

- Credit

- Lawyer

- Donate

- Degree

- Hosting

- Claim

Still can't see it. But just to be sure, you're saying that the $100/month website was directly generating most of that $5B?

And not, for example, being just a bridge between users and an army of attorneys?

Qualified leads are king in that business.

Keep in mind that a large number of law firms in this space do not try cases and just generate and sell leads.

Yes, obviously there's a lot more that goes into it, but my point was that websites can be extremely simple in their infrastructure and still be extremely effective.

The online property only accounts for about 10% of the total ad spend (over $200M/yr). The website accounts for exactly 0% of the bread and butter (high volume, low profit) business, but easily 60% or more of the the rest of it (low volume, absurd profit).

I've talked at length about it before in comments. Not really looking for the repeat discussions.

This use case is about where AWS cost effective scalability ends, anything more complicated and you are into multiple thousands a month for a redundant solution for a critical web-app with a database. We used to run prod and stage envs in aws but as our stage environment grew we realized we could on-prem some pretty bad-a* hardware for the cost of a few months AWS billing. Now we run prod on aws, staging and dev locally.

There's a cost maintaining a staging environment on-prem while prod is on a cloud. Slightly different versions of databases, different networking, etc... It could create issues. This does depend on how much you buy into the AWS ecosystem, if it's strictly EC2-only it's not as much of a problem.

Not that I wouldn't do it, a lot of times it does make financial sense.

Second that.. and hardest thing is you don't really know where you are getting charged. i mean you can look at the billing but boy they do add up to 1000s before you know and you are so hooked into auto scaling, s3, rds with multi-az what not..

You don't exactly need to tell me. I have 10^4 machines in multiple clouds right now plus more n datacenters. Cost effective scaling is hard, but you have to design your applications around it.

Tbh, I find most engineering orgs don't have the competency to pull it off.