Replacing Cloud with Metal

While Mettlo is a new company, it has deep roots in the European web and hosting industry. Many of our founding team members were also founders or early employees of Loopia—currently a major European hosting company with brands in several countries—and Pingdom, a revolutionary monitoring tool loved by web developers around the globe.

These companies were started before cloud providers like AWS were a thing, so running our own servers was the natural thing to do. However, when we moved on to new ventures with brands such as Dooer and Voitto, we bought into the cloud promise and went all-in on AWS.

The Cloud Promise and Its Challenges

Moving to the cloud eliminated the need to manage physical servers and allowed us to treat infrastructure as code. But in reality, it didn’t simplify our infrastructure setup much—it just moved it online and introduced a bunch of cloud-specific concepts instead. Above all, it did not lower costs; quite the opposite!

Around the time 37signals rightly stirred up some noise about their cloud exit, we were wrapping up our own. As can be seen in the AWS expenditure graph below, we were averaging $25,000 per month (about $300,000 per year) in cloud spend.

Making the Shift Back to Metal

We decided to replace our cloud infrastructure with physical servers, investing approximately $115,000 upfront and a monthly datacenter fee of $4,000. While we probably could have optimized our cloud bill somewhat, these physical servers paid for themselves in just six months.

Even though the load on these servers has increased quite drastically during 2024, we’re currently averaging about 25% CPU and 10% RAM utilization, so there’s ample room for spikes and growth before any additional hardware is required.

Technical Transition

With the new hardware, we run our workloads on high-availability Kubernetes clusters. To migrate our workloads off AWS, we made the following key technical changes:

• Event Management
  Moved from AWS SQS and SNS to Kafka.
• Data Storage
  Transitioned our AWS S3 storage to an S3-compatible API using Ceph/Rook.
• Container Orchestration
  Shifted from ECS containers to containers managed by Kubernetes.

These changes not only reduced our dependence on proprietary cloud services but also enhanced our control over the infrastructure.

Easier and More Affordable Hosting

As with Loopia, Pingdom, Dooer, and Voitto, our goal has always been to make it easier to run a company with an online presence. With Mettlo, it’s no different. We know for a fact that you can achieve high-performance and high-availability hosting both more easily and more cheaply than through a hyperscaler.

If you’re tired of that costly cloud bill and are seeking an alternative, you’re more than welcome to get in touch. Let’s explore how making the move from cloud to metal can benefit your business just as it did ours.