Came here to share my story, which is very close to what you describe.
tl;dr: Moved from AWS to colo in desperate attempt to make balance sheet more attractive. It worked.
Before I took over the engineering bits at this plateau/failing startup, they were all in on AWS. Monthly costs were running at around £3k. Which is not much, but since the revenue was tiny, the costs of hosting was "considerable". After a monumental effort on my part to try to make things more efficient and streamlined, I eventually run out of motivation (but that's another story) so I expressed my wish to leave to the founder and he finally agreed to my years old suggestion of going lean-and-mean and in one last attempt to make the company more attractive to one last investment round (E by then). Make it or break it, as the say goes.
On that same week I came across a HPE "Buy One Get One Free" offer (similar to this one https://www.serversdirect.co.uk/pdf/BOGOF-Gen9-Servers.pdf). Then found guy who was re-selling colo space at a under-used datacentre in London. Since I (sysadmin/DevOps/InfoSec/Backend engineer Jack-of-all-trades master of none) was the person who would end up managing the new metal, I picked a location within an hours drive from home.
And so it happened.
2x 1U HPE proliant servers with decent CPU and 32G of RAM. And 6x Samsung 850 SSDs off Amazon. Total bill for the hardware (BOGOF refund included): £2600 ish.
Post migration, monthly hosting costs: £50 for the colo; £50-ish AWS S3+CloudFront (10M assets would increase the SSD storage costs too much); £40 in taxi fares when I visit the DC once a month for kernel updates.
And just like that, we broke even the very next month after the last "big" AWS bill.
Our product wasn't all that exciting, but 2 months later we found a buyer who was happy to snatch this "non loss making" operation.
3 months after the acquisition, they had already migrated the whole thing back to AWS and the HPE proliant servers were gathering dust in their office.
Of course, because how do you scale up when you're building everything yourself? Suddenly you have to hire a whole bunch of hardware guys, storage guys, db guys etc, etc.
Why do you need a DB guy if you host it on your server or AWSs? You have a DB either way. You can have a guy if you want or not... Physical location means nothing.
DB guy to tune the instance the database runs on + figure out your streaming backups etc.
It's not a full time job, but it's a couple of days a week; and completely taken care of if you use RDS
I think your estimate is off by a factor of about 40. RDS is great at what it does, but it doesn't do that much. Getting the stuff RDS gives you for "free" might take a a few days to set up, but after that, your automated backups are going to take just as much of your time as the ones RDS gives you, ie, none.
If RDS saves you 30 minutes a week I'd be surprised.
A couple of days a week? That's ridiculous, once you have established procedures the only thing left is regular OS maintenance tasks which are the same as the rest of your servers.
Came here to share my story, which is very close to what you describe.
tl;dr: Moved from AWS to colo in desperate attempt to make balance sheet more attractive. It worked.
Before I took over the engineering bits at this plateau/failing startup, they were all in on AWS. Monthly costs were running at around £3k. Which is not much, but since the revenue was tiny, the costs of hosting was "considerable". After a monumental effort on my part to try to make things more efficient and streamlined, I eventually run out of motivation (but that's another story) so I expressed my wish to leave to the founder and he finally agreed to my years old suggestion of going lean-and-mean and in one last attempt to make the company more attractive to one last investment round (E by then). Make it or break it, as the say goes.
On that same week I came across a HPE "Buy One Get One Free" offer (similar to this one https://www.serversdirect.co.uk/pdf/BOGOF-Gen9-Servers.pdf). Then found guy who was re-selling colo space at a under-used datacentre in London. Since I (sysadmin/DevOps/InfoSec/Backend engineer Jack-of-all-trades master of none) was the person who would end up managing the new metal, I picked a location within an hours drive from home.
And so it happened.
2x 1U HPE proliant servers with decent CPU and 32G of RAM. And 6x Samsung 850 SSDs off Amazon. Total bill for the hardware (BOGOF refund included): £2600 ish.
Post migration, monthly hosting costs: £50 for the colo; £50-ish AWS S3+CloudFront (10M assets would increase the SSD storage costs too much); £40 in taxi fares when I visit the DC once a month for kernel updates.
And just like that, we broke even the very next month after the last "big" AWS bill. Our product wasn't all that exciting, but 2 months later we found a buyer who was happy to snatch this "non loss making" operation.
3 months after the acquisition, they had already migrated the whole thing back to AWS and the HPE proliant servers were gathering dust in their office.