Come for the Ride…

If there’s anything watching the news has taught me, it’s that excessive spending and uncontrolled growth will ultimately lead to a big crash.  Sure, when the times are good and your customers are paying for your R&D, growth or fancy company retreats, more = better.  However, during the tough times when most people are double clipping their cash to make sure it stays in their pocket, have excess fat on your operations could cost ya in the long run and chances are the government will not bail YOU out.

Since our operations for the most part is still pretty compact, I’ve been pushing the team to focus on trimming the fat in our technology.  When you face a scaling issue with your website, there are a couple of options available to help relieve the issues:

1. You can simply buy more machines to scale up if you can afford the cost.
2. You can tweak your code and squeeze more out of your existing infrastructure.  This one costs money and time as well but the improvements will help you exponentially as you scale up buying more machines.

Of course, both are really valid ways to grow - but if you do 1 without at least attempting 2, then you’re setting yourself up for bloat and wasted expenses.

In the case of EasyAutoSales - our monthly AWS costs for processing and storing images are getting close to  $1,000 a month. For a service that is supposed to the cheaper solution, it either means we’re growing well beyond our initial expectations or that we need to tweak the setup to work faster so we can save some dough.  Luckily for us, our problems are a combination of both growth and some bloat, the latter which we can fix.

In addition to tweaking some processes to make sure everything runs smoother and faster, we also found that Amazon now offers a cheaper mid-sized EC2 where it offers more computing power at half the price.  I guess Amazon realized that many are using EC2 for computing and not necessarily storage for a website and have decided to offer this new service to respond to the usage patterns.  By making code changes and instance changes, we expect to save a significant amount of money, possibly up to 25-30% of our monthly bill with Amazon.

With that said, what have you done with your startup this month to curb expenses?

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