Re-evaluating the Cloud

Last year 37 Signals (makers of Basecamp and Hey)  announced they were leaving the cloud. I wrote about the decision, and wondered if they'd look back at this as a great decision or one they'd regret and backtrack to the cloud again. They planned to build their own tooling, buy a bunch of servers, and run their own data center (or rather, rent space in someone's data center). Recently there was an update, in an FAQ, about how the transition has gone. In short, very well. One of the founders, David Heinemeier Hansson answered several questions about the move and the financial status. They didn't hire more people, so their payroll is the same. They used a service to unpack and rack their servers, so they could just connect to them remotely and not deal with hardware. They built their own redundancy across two data centers where they rent space, and they think they will save well over $7 million in the next 5 years. They had a $3.2million cloud budget per year, so that appears to be halved (3x5=15 - 7 = 8ish) with their move. Read the rest of Re-Evaluating the Cloud