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Comment by awesome_dude | Hacker News Reader

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awesome_dude

> Github is ripe for disruption and I hope it is disrupted soon.

It's an expensive, low revenue generating site.

There are, and have always been, competitors, including "host it all yourself" solutions, but nothing has really stuck.

How is it "ripe" for disruption?

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They had $1b revenue in 2023 and now probably more than $2b in revenue... do you have cost figures showing what their expenses are?

> We have since added more than 3 million CPU cores, 120 petabytes of high-speed storage, and significant network capacity. We installed as much hardware as available power allowed in our existing data centers while accelerating our migration to Azure.

That can't be cheap.

A server box now has around 256 CPU cores. So that's about 12000 servers. If each one is $10k that's $120 million. Not a lot compared to Github's income.

Does that $10k server not need RAM?

If parent commenter is off by an order of magnitude in their costs, their point still stands.

$1.2 billion of costs on revenue of $1-$2b certainly seems like a big concern.

They do not throw away the servers every year..

But at this rate of growth, sounds like they'll need to buy around that amount every year just to keep up with current (not even taking into account future) growth.

$10,000 is only enough for CPU cost (2x AMD EPYC 9754). The rest of the servers (mainboard, RAM, storage, power supply, network card, rack, cooling, etc.) can easily triple or quadruple the cost.

Yup. Still, it's less than their annual income by several times.

Microsoft don't release the costs as you know, but

Compute and Storage for Free Tiers: Hosting code for over 150 million developers and processing over 2 billion GitHub Actions (CI/CD) workflows a month requires astronomical server power and data storage. The "Free" tier is a massive cost sink that Microsoft treats as a loss-leader marketing expense

Let me know when you understand how that's not free.

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