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Comment by juliansimioni | Hacker News Reader

This is a good list of ways to reduce outgoing bandwidth costs, but as someone who has switched from backend developer to running a small business, I can't help but notice that they don't talk at all about whether any of their cost savings were meaningful to the business.

Sure, it looks like they saved about $2000/month, but consider that those savings probably won't even pay for more than a quarter of a one of their developers.

Even though their service is free (their parent company gets business value from the aggregate analytics they obtain through their service), it very possible that there's something they could have done to bring more value to their parent company than the money they saved here.

Maybe it's unreasonable to expect a company to talk about that in a blog post, but it left me wondering.

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My read was that they actually saved over $8000 per month:

- They mention that the initial savings of $1500/mo from omitting unnecessary headers was 12% of their egress cost (so the total before this was $12500)

- Then they got an additional 8% of savings by increasing the ALB idle connection timeout to 10 minutes (down to $10120)

- Finally they said they saved $200 per day by switching to a lighter TLS certificate chain ($6000/mo, so down to $4120)

None of those steps seem to have required any meaningful amount of development work. Let's say this took a developer one week? The return on that effort would be $100k a year, or $2500/hour for the first year alone.

Maybe it is a good thing that cloud is so expensive here.. The internet traffic is bloated enough already :)

Considering they have enumerated this for others to pick up and execute quickly, they may have just saved the wider industry potentially 100s of thousands per month.

Give and take is an open source attitude. It doesn’t always have to be about source code, sometimes it can be about cost savings techniques such as this.

> consider that those savings probably won't even pay for more than a quarter of a one of their developers

Although I never run a business, I do believe this kind of optimization is quite meaningful even though they will never be the top priority of a business.

Those optimizations lower operational cost while being mostly maintainance free (except the one that switches off from AWS certificate manager, which may increase some effort when renewing), risk free (unlike refactoring a large legacy system) and requiring little engineering effort (Maybe 10 engineering days from investigation to writing the blog post?)

In addition this blog post itself brings intangible benefit on their branding, website ranking and hiring.

I think you're exactly right. It has become a HN trope that every cost optimization story gets a response like this: your infrastructure costs are trumped by the cost of your developers, so why spend the expensive resource (developers) on optimizing the comparatively cheap bit (infrastructure). I'm tired of the trope because it's such an oversimplification.

What matters is the return on investment, and as you state, one of the great things about cost optimization is that its returns come largely risk free. By my math the optimizations described here return $100k a year. On a risk-adjusted basis, what task could this developer have performed that would have returned more?

In this thread line regarding small businesses, another critical point is that the $24,000 (and certainly in the $100k premise) also might be part of the remainder compensation or profit calculation for the owner of the business. Sure it pales next to the cost of five engineers and yet it could easily be anywhere from 1/10 to 1/3 of the annual profit for a small business. If you're the owner, that's a big deal over time. You never know how tight a small business has to operate, however typically it's thinner than not.

you are kind of making the assumption that the developer spent all year working on this cost optimization.

I'd bet the optimization and subsequent write up in a blog post didn't take more than a week to get done from start to finish.

Let's say it is $2k/mo. I also run a small business. And when things are growing it's easy to think that way. But in the long run every business that faces competition needs to focus on the bottom line. How many developer hours do you think it took to save that $24,000 per year? Not much. And that is just one example. A culture that ignores efficiency is doomed to failure.

> Let's say it is $2k/mo. I also run a small business.

Your server bill should be $100/mo - $200/mo max for a "small" business. I've ran a multi-tenant SaaS platform on a $200/mo DigitalOcean budget (server for Postgres, server for Redis, server for node.js apps) that brought in $30k/mo. If you're spending that much a month on cloud hosting, consider yourself got by the marketing of "serverless".

In this case, they receive five billion requests a day, from a client base of over a billion. That's not really a small business any more.

I don't know what DigitalOcean would charge for servers at that scale.

I think you missed GP's point. They aren't telling us how much their business makes, they are replying to the posts saying "that wasn't worth it" -> "maybe it was worth it because it was probably ~8k" with "even if it was 2k it was worth it".

I'm not sure this is really questioning anything more than "I wonder if there is something they could have done better in terms of business operations" to which I can't imagine the answer ever being anything other than "yes", especially in retrospect.

> those savings probably won't even pay for more than a quarter of a [developer]

So you're assuming that configuring nginx properly, once, takes 3 months, every year? If it takes the developer (or sysadmin) less long than that, you're already saving money.

Isn't IT all about investing in fixed cost upfront and reaping profits on the variable costs in the future?

Hey boss, just found a way to save 2 grand a month without any operational impact!

Johnson, you’re fired! I just saved myself 10 grand a month!

Narrator: where do I sign up to work for that guy...........

I'd much rather that $2,000/month go to my developer than to line Bezos' pocket.

FYI: $2000/month pay 2+ developers in half of the world.

No it doesn't. Not good ones.

If it saves $24,000 a year, and your developer cost is $100/hour, 240 hours or less spent a year on this effort is your breakeven. Pretty sure that's a win.

yup. at scale, percentage is what matters.

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