How we reduced our annual server costs by 80% — from $1M to $200k — by moving away from AWS
<p>This week we interviewed Zsot Varga, the lead engineer and manager at Prerender.io. He shares how Prerender saved $800k by removing their reliance on AWS and building in-house infrastructure to handle traffic and cached data.</p>
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<p>“The goal was to reduce costs while maintaining the same speed of rendering and quality of service. Migrations like this need to be carefully planned and executed, as incorrect configuration or poor execution, would cause downtime for customer web pages and social media clicks and make their search rankings suffer and potentially increase our churn rate.”</p>
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<h2>Can you describe Prerender and the most interesting technical problem you’re solving</h2>
<p>Prerender, in simple terms, caches and prerenders your JavaScript pages so search engines can have a pure HTML file to crawl and index, and all it needs is to have the proper middleware installed on the site, avoiding users the pain of costly and long JavaScript workarounds.</p>
<p>However, all this data and processes need to happen on a server and, of course, we used AWS for it. A few years of growth later, we’re handling over 70,000 pages per minute, storing around 560 million pages, and paying well over $1,000,000 per year.</p>
<p>Or at least we would be paying that much if we stayed with AWS. Instead, we were able to cut costs by 80% in a little over three months with some out-of-the-box thinking and a clear plan. Here’s how you could too.</p>
<p><a href="https://levelup.gitconnected.com/how-we-reduced-our-annual-server-costs-by-80-from-1m-to-200k-by-moving-away-from-aws-2b98cbd21b46">Click Here</a></p>