Comment by gbear605
9 months ago
I’ve seen startups with a thousand active users paying $50k/month (though that’s overall costs, not just db). It’s really easy to waste a lot of money doing nothing.
9 months ago
I’ve seen startups with a thousand active users paying $50k/month (though that’s overall costs, not just db). It’s really easy to waste a lot of money doing nothing.
It’s especially easy to waste money on databases.
People just throw more compute power (ie money) at performance problems, rather than fixing their queries or making better use of indices.
You can see this in the article here, where they are just using whatever garbage queries Prisma spits out.
I’ve contended for a long time that ORMs and their ilk automatically building queries is an antipattern for anything but small data scale. At any reasonable size of db, you’re going to need to know sql well enough to write optimized queries anyway. There’s essential complexity in the DB queries, which ORMs can only hide for so long.
And do not consider owning the hardware. See what hardware you can buy for that money.
How many servers are needed to bounce back from a server failure in a few minutes? Should we consider 3 VMs instead of 1 physical?
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As a small business owner — I recently spent an hour canceling things that just added up over time and that I don’t now need. It’s just so easy to waste money, period.
Directly to your point though, I once encountered a salesperson who was running an entire sandbox environment of a very large platform to the tune of about $25k/mo. It sat idle for almost half a year before someone came knocking. The cloud team did an audit and they were a little spicy about it, understandably.