HACKER Q&A
📣 mojoe

Have you heard of a private equity firm focused on cutting cloud costs?


Every once in a while I see posts discussing how ridiculously overpriced cloud providers are (e.g. the recent "How Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by NOT Going to the Cloud" https://tech.ahrefs.com/how-ahrefs-saved-us-400m-in-3-years-by-not-going-to-the-cloud-8939dd930af8)

As someone who works with AWS/Azure/GCP a lot I've always found these articles to be mostly overblown PR-seeking pieces, but self-hosting IS much cheaper for many applications if you have the right team to manage your servers.

Has anyone here ever encountered a private equity firm that focuses on acquiring sizable cloud-hosted software companies and converting them to run on self-hosted colo servers in order to radically improve profit margins?

It seems like a difficult act to pull off, but if any of these "we're saving SO MUCH MONEY self-hosting" people can actually run insanely cheap servers with similar robustness/security levels as the major cloud providers then it's a massive business opportunity for such a team.

Anyone capitalizing on this?

  👤 sophiabits Accepted Answer ✓
If you’re already on the cloud and operating at sufficiently large scale, moving to colo is REALLY hard.

It took Dropbox ~2.5 years.

There’s a LOT of room to cut costs by moving off the cloud—AWS has profit margins ~30% even with significant investments into R&D. But I’m not sure that moving off the cloud is the best move for a private equity firm looking to quickly extract returns. It’s a lot easier to tweak pricing / cut staff / etc

👤 andrewfromx
no but some possible name ideas for this firm:

"Back to Earth"

"Get your Head out of the Clouds"

"Colo is not Yolo"