If you're building your own boxes, sure the price of physical sticks of RAM aren't the bulk of the cost, and you can build high-RAM boxes.
If you're renting servers or virtual servers (VPS/cloud), then the physical cost of RAM is irrelevant. Virtually all hosting companies use configured RAM as a proxy for their costs (the more RAM you need, the more likely you are to be using more CPU which means more electric, more disk IO, more bandwidth, and generally putting more wear-and-tear on the hardware which will need replacing sooner).
An 8GB stick of ECC RAM might cost you less than $99 to purchase outright, but Softlayer (the #1 most used bare metal server company by YC startups) will charge $88/month for it ($11/GB/mo to add 8GB to one of their base configurations).
> An 8GB stick of ECC RAM might cost you less than $99 to purchase outright, but Softlayer (the #1 most used bare metal server company by YC startups) will charge $88/month for it ($11/GB/mo to add 8GB to one of their base configurations).
I never understood this. I started and sold a hosting company in the early 2000's. I've run managed hosting divisions for Fortune 500 companies. Hosting is STUPID profitable (>30% margins). Why doesn't Y Combinator grab 10-20 racks in a cheap colo center, buy $100K-$200K worth of equipment, and provision that to YC startups similar to Rackspace's OnMetal offering?
I do DevOps now, but colo is still not as hard as everyone makes it out to be.
Who'd maintain & administer it? As I understand it, YC is not in the business of providing business services to its portfolio companies. They setup the network and information, but they don't really have headcount or hiring expertise to bring functional roles in-house and then rent them out to portfolio companies for cheap.
It's an interesting question whether there's a market for an investment firm that does do this. One of the things that appealed to me about Google under Eric Schmidt was that it basically functioned as a venture capital firm that had shared technology infrastructure, server maintenance, legal, PR, etc. but let you choose what to work on and come up with your own product ideas, with the one caveat that Google would own any business you built. It'd be very interesting to see a VC firm that did the same - cover all the functional roles so that entrepreneurs could focus on pure product development. I hear a16z is sorta shooting for that, but they cover more of the human-capital stuff like recruitment, executive search, etc. rather than the technical stuff.
There isn't an obvious line from "save 30% on your hosting bill" to "grow by 8% this week", which suggests that it isn't terribly high on YC's list of priorities. I can think of a few YC companies with notable infrastructure requirements but for many of them it's below the noise floor.
I'd be interested in the yearly/3-year cost data of infrastructure based on a VC's total tech portfolio. I can't believe it to be insignificant. If you're a tech startup, your two biggest costs are labor and infrastructure/hardware.
The fully-loaded cost of a full-time Rails programmer is, let's say, $15k per month.
An Amazon m3.large with 7.5GB of RAM and a 32GB SSD costs $64 per month if I reserve a year in advance. (And why wouldn't I, given that the proposed alternative is to buy hardware?)
If I wave the magic wand and save 30% on the cost of each m3.large, I save $19 per month per instance.
If my company runs the equivalent of twenty m3.large instances per programmer, 24 hours a day, for a whole year, my magic-wand-powered savings will add up to six additional programmer workdays - about $4600 per programmer. If I start out on January 1 with a year of runway, I'll go broke on January 9 of next year instead of January 1.
So, even if I were to believe in the existence of magic wands, they wouldn't make much of a difference.
If you're a tech startup, your two biggest costs are labor and infrastructure/hardware.
I am aware of many companies where advertising, conferences (throwing their own), laptops/mice/etc, rent, general office overhead, credit card processing, and about five other things I'm forgetting are still higher than infrastructure/hardware, in addition to direct costs of employment. (Obviously, less true if you run Dropbox, but COGS is looooooooooow in most SaaS companies for a reason.)
If you're renting servers or virtual servers (VPS/cloud), then the physical cost of RAM is irrelevant. Virtually all hosting companies use configured RAM as a proxy for their costs (the more RAM you need, the more likely you are to be using more CPU which means more electric, more disk IO, more bandwidth, and generally putting more wear-and-tear on the hardware which will need replacing sooner).
An 8GB stick of ECC RAM might cost you less than $99 to purchase outright, but Softlayer (the #1 most used bare metal server company by YC startups) will charge $88/month for it ($11/GB/mo to add 8GB to one of their base configurations).