Hacker News Reader

This! We did the exact same, though our payback period was 2 months of AWS costs. Try and put the base load on your own servers, use the cloud to scale up and down when needed.

Cloud servers are a “luxury” that most don’t realise and just take for granted. Having said that, there are obvious overheads with handling your own servers, but when your costs are several salaries it’s probably worth considering.

Was about to suggest the same thing. You can buy physical machines with beefy specs for much less than your cloud bill when you get to these extremes.

this is good advice-- you can run those boxes into the ground for five years and easily get paid back

What does colocation mean in this context? Did you buy the servers and AWS hosted on their premises?

Colocation just means buying space in a datacenter somewhere (and it comes with a certain amount of power and bandwidth).