Comment by chmod775
Given that the full AWS setup that would replace that one server would cost closer to $6000-8000 / month, they could just use that money to buy a bunch of extra hard drives, a backup server, and hire a junior dev/sysadmin whose only job is to watch over it, still coming out ahead of AWS.
I’m seeing more like $5k/mo with reservations but even at those figures … how many skilled DBAs are you getting for $72-96k? Don’t forget that rolling it yourself means you have to build and test all of the hardware, maintenance processes, backups, multi-data center HA, etc. yourself. That’s not junior trainee level work and some of it is ongoing (e.g. every OS and hardware change) or at intervals not of your choosing (say you discover a kernel or firmware issue when it’s crashing randomly - how many months of savings will be canceled out by pulling senior people off of whatever they’re working on?).
You can beat AWS on pricing but not like this. You need to be finding areas where you have a lot of baseline demand – enough to amortize the cost of all of the lower level work – and can cut some of the things they do which you don’t need. For example, if you can afford more downtime in a disaster scenario or can rely on an external rebuild process if the database backups turn out to be unusable.