This is somewhat unrelated, but I remember reading in one of Mixpanel's job posts that they had over 200 servers. 200 for a company of their size that charges by the data point seems kind of a lot. I've worked at a couple tech companies who get by with an order of magnitude less servers and deal with the same load that I bet they deal with. So either they were exaggerating by re-defining what a "server" was in the cloud, they have tons of (costly) freeloaders, or their infrastructure is inefficient.