"While Heroku charges a small premium over other hosting services, our small team size and high traffic makes the tradeoff really beneficial since we save big on DevOps costs (a topic we’ll save for another post)."

A small premium?

Like the author says "could it be done cheaper, whatever"... sure - valid point.

I just had to amuse myself at Heroku's hosting charges being "a small premium".

The level of arrogance with these guys is quite something.

Considering they're spending $211,000+ per year on hosting, and paying at least twice as much as they need to, it would be incredibly irresponsible not to spend the time to learn how to do devops and get these costs under control.

Since they're located in Canada, the amount of money they save could probably pay for a full-time in-house devops engineer.

This reminds me of EverPix, a photo storage company that went bankrupt because they couldn't pay their Amazon storage bill, yet considering that 99.99% of their photos were basically in 'cold storage', could have probably traded the majority of their $35,000/month S3 bill for a $8,000/one-off BackBlaze Storage Pod + colo fees.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/5/5039216/everpix-life-and-d...

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/storage-pod-4-5-tweaking-a-pr...

The main cost is using a third-party to scale and serve photos, about $11k.

Case study: https://www.imgix.com/case-studies/unsplash

According to which Unsplash is serving 350 million image requests per month.

That seems reasonable, given the scale of the operation. Any alternative would have to come underneath that price point, while providing the same reliability/benefits. That's a hard task, and definitely a major devops and development undertaking.

This write up was informative - the optimal solution very rarely comes down to just dollars and cents. In fact I'd trust Unsplash _less_ if they moved from a good, solid system to rolling their own, just to save a few thousand per month.