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Comment by sonaltr | Hacker News Reader

For a B2B SAAS company...what's the ideal user cost of infrastructure? (I understand that it depends on the service..but a ratio of profit per user vs cost per user should be close no?)

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I forget which report it was in but the average tech-focused startup spends 10-15% of revenue on infrastructure. Mature businesses spend ~5%.

The ideal cost is as low as possible without sacrificing future scaling needs or development velocity. At some point, you'll start to experience diminishing returns.

It usually goes POC->Cloud provider->Your own gear

apart from the bigger companies (like Fb), have there been any major SaaS companies (esp. B2B but I guess that's trying to be too narrow so B2B & B2C) that have moved from Cloud to their own Data Center? (I know Etsy comes to mind...but apart from them?).

Dropbox: https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/15/why-dropbox-decided-to-dro...

Github: https://githubengineering.com/evolution-of-our-data-centers/

Backblaze: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/our-secret-data-center/

Twitter: https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...

LinkedIn: http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/content-tracks/design-buil...

FastMail: https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/security.html

Stack Overflow: http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/7/21/stackoverflow-upda...

Wikipedia: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers

OpenStreetMap: https://blog.openstreetmap.org/tag/infrastructure/

The Internet Archive: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/16/head_like_a_memory_...

Gitlab tried, but didn't have the necessary in-house experience before they made the attempt: https://about.gitlab.com/2017/03/02/why-we-are-not-leaving-t...

Instagram was migrated from AWS onto Facebook's infrastructure: https://www.wired.com/2014/06/facebook-instagram/

WhatsApp was migrated from IBM to Facebook infrastructure: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/07/facebook-planning-to-move-wh...

Hacker News and Pinboard (acq. Delicious) run on a single server.

It's not hard, but you do need to know what you're doing and have resources to do it (most orgs rent colo space in someone else's datacenter, they don't build their own). There's a reason AWS margins are so high (which leaves a lot of cost savings to be had when your workload isn't highly variable). Any questions, email is in my profile. I spent ~16 years building data centers, hosting environments, infrastructure, etc.

Many SaaS companies not only lack the ops experience needed to run their own infrastructure (which may be only problem of perception, for me running stuff on dedicated HW in colo center seems like less hassle than dealing with things like AWS) but also the common sense required to not over-engineer the scalability of their solution in the early phases (which falls squarely into the YAGNI teritory, as you can run surprisingly large stuff on two or three physical low-end 1U servers).

It surely depends on how much users pay for the service, and how high the non-software costs are.

But in any case, the examples given are B2C free to use products which are generally going to provide... not a ton of revenue per user.

I thought Dropbox's revenue mainly comes from it's business clients - B2B is more $ compared to B2C although B2C might be more profitable as customers might pay the $10/1TB and not really use that much anyways)

Their paying users have increased, but the revenue per user has decreased (based on the S1...which I assume is because of enterprise deals).

This is from the SNAP S1 not the dropbox S1

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