Comment by weavie
14 hours ago
What is the upper limit of Hertzner? Say you have an AWS bill in the $100s of millions, could Hertzner realistically take on that scale?
14 hours ago
What is the upper limit of Hertzner? Say you have an AWS bill in the $100s of millions, could Hertzner realistically take on that scale?
An interesting question, so time for some 100% speculation.
It sounds like they probably have revenue in the €500mm range today. And given that the bare metal cost of AWS-equivalent bills tends to be a 90% reduction, we'll say a €10mm+ bare metal cost.
So I would say a cautious and qualified "yes". But I know even for smaller deployments of tens or hundreds of servers, they'll ask you what the purpose is. If you say something like "blockchain," they're going to say, "Actually, we prefer not to have your business."
I get the strong impression that while they naturally do want business, they also aren't going to take a huge amount of risk on board themselves. Their specialism is optimising on cost, which naturally has to involve avoiding or mitigating risk. I'm sure there'd be business terms to discuss, put it that way.
Why would a client who wants to run a Blockchain be risky for Herzner? I'm not a fan, I just don't see the issue. If the client pays their monthly bill, who cares if they're using the machine to mine for Bitcoin?
They are certain to run the machines at 100% continually, which will cost more than a typical customer who doesn't do this, and leave the old machines with less second-hand value for their auction thing afterwards.
2 replies →
Who are you thinking of?
Netflix might be spending as much as $120m (but probably a little less), and I thought they were probably Amazon's biggest customer. Does someone (single-buyer) spend more than that with AWS?
Hertzner's revenue is somewhere around $400m, so probably a little scary taking on an additional 30% revenue from a single customer, and Netflix's shareholders would probably be worried about risk relying on a vendor that is much smaller than them.
Sometimes if the companies are friendly to the idea, they could form a joint venture or maybe Netflix could just acquire Hertzner (and compete with Amazon?), but I think it unlikely Hertzner could take on Netflix-sized for nontechnical reasons.
However increasing pop capacity by 30% within 6mo is pretty realistic, so I think they'd probably be able to physically service Netflix without changing too much if management could get comfortable with the idea
A $120M spend on AWS is equivalent to around a $12M spend on Hetzner Dedicated (likely even less, the factor is 10-20x in my experience), so that would be 3% of their revenue from a single customer.
> A $120M spend on AWS is equivalent to around a $12M spend on Hetzner Dedicated (likely even less, the factor is 10-20x in my experience), so that would be 3% of their revenue from a single customer.
I'm not convinced.
I assume someone at Netflix has thought about this, because if that were true and as simple as you say, Netflix would simply just buy Hetzner.
I think there lots of reasons you could have this experience, and it still wouldn't be Netflix's experience.
For one, big applications tend to get discounts. A decade ago when I (the company I was working for) was paying Amazon a mere $0,2M a month and getting much better prices from my account manager than were posted on the website.
There are other reasons (mostly from my own experiences pricing/costing big applications, but also due to some exotic/unusual Amazon features I'm sure Netflix depends on) but this is probably big enough: Volume gets discounts, and at Netflix-size I would expect spectacular discounts.
I do not think we can estimate the factor better than 1.5-2x without a really good example/case-study of a company someplace in-between: How big are the companies you're thinking about? If they're not spending at least $5m a month I doubt the figures would be indicative of the kind of savings Netflix could expect.
1 reply →
That $120m will become $12m when they're not using AWS.
> Hertzner's revenue is somewhere around $400m, so probably a little scary taking on an additional 30% revenue from a single customer
A little scare for both sides.
Unless we're misunderstanding something I think the $100Ms figure is hard to consider in a vacuum.
I'm largely just thinking $HUGE when throwing out that number, but there are plenty of companies that have cloud costs in that range. A quick search brings up Walmart, Meta, Netflix, Spotify, Snap, JP Morgan.
Figma apparently spends around 300-400k/day on AWS. I think this puts them up there.
How is this reasonable? At what point do they pull a Dropbox and de-AWS? I can’t think of why they would gain with AWS over in house hosting at that point.
I’m not surprised, but you’d think there would be some point where they would decide to build a data center of their own. It’s a mature enough company.