Comment by Rastonbury

> millions upon millions of new people suddenly switched to Signal in January 2021 after WhatsApp updated their Terms of Service

From a footnote of the article. Maybe this is why they've stayed with "infinite scale, infinite costs" (commonly known as "cloud") so long? Surely at some point this is worth considering though, I would also be curious where that point lies

Virtually anyone, also when spending only 100 euros/month on server providers, can save a large percentage of costs by taking it in-house. There might be a gap where you need dedicated personnel and it's briefly cheaper to outsource before you grow and it inverts again, but generally if you've got a stable service then this is nearly always worth it

Maybe a hybrid, where new users onboard onto cloud and they buy hardware for expected loads (i.e. current users), would be the most cost effective. I wonder how hard that is to combine the two worlds, but anything that requires more than one server already has that sort of communication going on so there shouldn't be any real blockers. Maybe the two types of infra add costs/risks again and that's why one rarely sees this setup?

I found that with the bandwidth and storage that my company was using on the cloud, we could get ROI in under 2 months by building a server and running it in house. Now we've scaled up to a dozen servers but it's still just a handful of computers in a closet that saves us $50k/mo in cloud costs. It was dirt cheap to slap together and scale up incrementally.

Data centers cost billions. Signal, and pretty much everyone else who isn't already in the data center business, is far away from breakeven on that.