An example of saving over 50 billion yen on server costs without using AWS

Amazon's cloud computing service 'Amazon Web Services (AWS)' can be used regardless of the size of the company, and depending on how it is used, it is possible to streamline operations and significantly reduce costs. On the other hand, depending on the environment, using AWS may increase costs. ` ` Ahrefs '', which develops access analysis systems, has succeeded in saving more than 400 million dollars (about 52.7 billion yen) in three years by not using AWS.

How Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by NOT Going to the Cloud | by Efim Mirochnik | Mar, 2023 | Ahrefs
https://tech.ahrefs.com/how-ahrefs-saved-us-400m-in-3-years-by-not-going-to-the-cloud-8939dd930af8

Ahrefs is a company that develops access analysis tools and has 600,000 users around the world, including Japan. Because of this, Ahrefs' servers have to handle a huge amount of traffic.

Ahrefs servers are hosted in Singapore data centers. The hardware in use at the time of writing the article was introduced in 2020 and is equipped with a multi-core CPU, 2TB of RAM, and an average of 15TB of storage.

Assuming that the same hardware will be used for 5 years, the following is the result of deriving the `` cost per server per month for Ahrefs '' considering electricity charges and communication charges. The cost of the server itself is $ 1025 per month (about 135,000 yen), the electricity bill and communication fee are $ 524 (about 69,000 yen), and the total cost is $ 1,550 (about 204,000 yen).

And the monthly fee when realizing the specifications requested by Ahrefs with AWS is as follows. The storage service ' Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) ' is $ 11,486 (about 1,514,000 yen), the computing service ' Amazon EC2 ' is $ 5,607 (about 739,000 yen), and the data transfer fee is $ 464 (about 61,000 yen), which costs a total of $ 17,557 (about 2,315,000 yen).

Comparing the cost per server Ahrefs is using and the cost when building the same environment with AWS, it looks like this. If you use AWS, your monthly cost will swell by 11.3 times.

And the cost comparison when operating 850 servers is as follows. The cost of operating for 30 months is $ 39,519,025 (about 5,210 million yen) for the server owned by Ahrefs, and $ 447,694,623 (about 59,030 million yen) for AWS. In other words, Ahrefs has succeeded in saving $ 48,175,598 (about 53,820 million yen) in 30 months by not using AWS.

According to Ahrefs, if AWS was adopted, it was impossible to pay the AWS usage fee with Ahrefs' revenue alone. “Companies interested in sustainable growth should reassess the benefits and costs of using cloud services,” Ahrefs said. As the scale of servers increases, the cost of using cloud computing services may become a burden.'