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Comment by jzawodn | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, it's always fun when I tell someone at we're 100% self-hosted too. They never stop to think that traffic, load, and usage patterns on craigslist are pretty well understood at this point. Plus it's certainly cheaper than paying someone else to run all your hardware. You get to pick your peers, pick your hardware, and allocate as you see fit.

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It's cheaper if you have a good team, which it sounds like you do.

A ton of places don't have a good team, and the cost numbers end up being a lot closer.

A great team will destroy Cloud margins. An Average-Bad team will fall in line, plus you don't have to run the team anymore.

Your comment makes sense, but it implies Netflix does not have a great team, or that it has other considerations than pure financial ones?

I've had many clients on AWS rack up six-figure monthly bills unnecessarily simply because they didn't realize how to design for cost.. it's not a silver bullet. Those penny fractions add up fast. There are a lot of tricks to save money.

We run into this at FastMail all the time as well. For the one customer who needed "their own gear" we built out on SoftLayer for much the same reasons as the article - real hardware where you need it.

But our operations costs are so much lower than renting that we could replace all our hardware every year and still break even.

(yeah, we could get SoftLayer to refresh our hardware every year as well, but we don't need it refreshed that fast, and at the end we still own the hardware)

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