Two interesting posts from Ahref describing the cost savings that drove their move from the cloud to a colocation datacenter.

Ahrefs has saved ~USD 400 million by ensuring its infrastructure is NOT 100% in the IaaS cloud during the last 2½ years. This figure is growing bigger, as currently we are starting another massive colocation data center with new hardware.

All the prices are unnegotiated prices, so there are definitely some low hanging fruits left to achieve lower cloud costs. But even if you discount the cloud prices by 30% to 50%, the savings are still quite impressive.

Apropos impressive. The team that manages the ~3300 servers only consists of 11 people!

We didn’t include personnel costs in our calculations because they don’t significantly impact the overall financial outcome. All of Ahrefs’ servers, spread across various colocation data centers, hosting providers, and AWS cloud, are effectively managed by a compact team of eleven people. This group comprises infrastructure and SRE engineers, data center technicians, and the author of this article. These skilled professionals have been managing, maintaining, upgrading, and troubleshooting our servers, networks, operating systems, and multiple software systems across different environments for many years.

Impressive indeed!