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How I Burned $47,000 on Cloud Servers (And What I Learned)
The spreadsheet that made my CFO cry, the migration that almost killed us, and the three decisions that cut our hosting bills in half
The email from our CFO started with “We need to talk about infrastructure costs.”
Never a good sign.
I walked into the conference room and she slid a spreadsheet across the table. Our monthly cloud hosting bill had grown from $8,000 to $14,500 in six months. At that rate, we’d hit $200k annually by year-end.
“What are we running?” she asked. “A small country?”
We weren’t. We had a SaaS product with maybe 5,000 users, a handful of customers generating actual revenue, and a team of 12 people. But somehow, we were paying enterprise prices for startup scale.
That conversation kicked off the most stressful — and valuable — six months of my career managing infrastructure. Here’s what I learned about cloud servers, terrible decisions, and the surprisingly simple ways to stop hemorrhaging money.
The Over-Provisioning Problem Nobody Talks About
When I joined the company as the first infrastructure hire, I did what every…
