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Ask HN: Have you heard of a private equity firm focused on cutting cloud costs?

4 points by mojoe ↗ HN
Every once in a while I see posts discussing how ridiculously overpriced cloud providers are (e.g. the recent "How Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by NOT Going to the Cloud" https://tech.ahrefs.com/how-ahrefs-saved-us-400m-in-3-years-by-not-going-to-the-cloud-8939dd930af8)

As someone who works with AWS/Azure/GCP a lot I've always found these articles to be mostly overblown PR-seeking pieces, but self-hosting IS much cheaper for many applications if you have the right team to manage your servers.

Has anyone here ever encountered a private equity firm that focuses on acquiring sizable cloud-hosted software companies and converting them to run on self-hosted colo servers in order to radically improve profit margins?

It seems like a difficult act to pull off, but if any of these "we're saving SO MUCH MONEY self-hosting" people can actually run insanely cheap servers with similar robustness/security levels as the major cloud providers then it's a massive business opportunity for such a team.

Anyone capitalizing on this?

2 comments

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andrewfromx
no but some possible name ideas for this firm:

"Back to Earth"

"Get your Head out of the Clouds"

"Colo is not Yolo"

sophiabits
If you’re already on the cloud and operating at sufficiently large scale, moving to colo is REALLY hard.

It took Dropbox ~2.5 years.

There’s a LOT of room to cut costs by moving off the cloud—AWS has profit margins ~30% even with significant investments into R&D. But I’m not sure that moving off the cloud is the best move for a private equity firm looking to quickly extract returns. It’s a lot easier to tweak pricing / cut staff / etc