"the cost of running 20 Ahrefs servers in their own data center is approximately $31,475 per month, while the cost of running an equivalent number of servers on AWS is approximately $136,416 per month" Wow, 77%! But this is such a hard argument to make to tech leaders today. They want to instantly scale up or down at will.
You can always initialize a hybrid approach, load-balancing across your cloud AZs and your on-premises infrastructure for sudden spikes in elasticity demand. Not trivial but works well. Yet you also need to factor in the payroll.
I think this shows that scaling like that isn't even needed if you run on your own hardware, you can spend the same amount as you would on cloud services and have 4x the capacity
