While by no means insignificant, this bill is no where near what I'd imagine would warrant a HN post. I wouldn't be surprised if most startups beat this regularly.
The startup whose backend I co-created racks up an AWS bill that hovers around a half million dollars a month. We make use of all of the ways to save with Amazon: pre-paid reserved instances, negotiated deals, etc. And we're not even that big; imagine what Netflix's AWS bill must cost?
We've tried other providers, toyed with co-locating, but at the end of the day the flexibility and cost benefit of IaaS outweighed the lower base price of CPU cycles when you roll it yourself.
> this bill is no where near what I'd imagine would warrant a HN post.
Can only guess at why folks like any post, but it's not necessarily how large the bill is. Maybe it's how low it is for a service that's widely relied on, or maybe it's the level of transparency, which turned out to include evanphx above showing up to answer questions about the project.
Compared to npm asking for $300,000 in donations to keep the thing running. I'm glad RubyGems can run for relatively so little, and be transparent in doing so.
The startup whose backend I co-created racks up an AWS bill that hovers around a half million dollars a month. We make use of all of the ways to save with Amazon: pre-paid reserved instances, negotiated deals, etc. And we're not even that big; imagine what Netflix's AWS bill must cost?
We've tried other providers, toyed with co-locating, but at the end of the day the flexibility and cost benefit of IaaS outweighed the lower base price of CPU cycles when you roll it yourself.