Top all-time · #2409
Ahrefs
Company blog · tech.ahrefs.comprogrammingsystems
Ahrefs is the company blog at tech.ahrefs.com, writing about programming and systems. Since 2017, 32 different Hacker News readers have linked it 40 times, most often “Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-21, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (17) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Ahrefs' engineering posts, such as the write-up of the Intel Skylake bug hunt and the post on saving $400M by running its own servers instead of the cloud.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 17 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud13 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2023-03-11
- Skylake bug: a detective story (2017)5 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2017-07-03
- How Ahrefs Gets a Billion Dollar-Worth Infrastructure with a 90% Discount2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-05-09
What Hacker News says?
Ahrefs | Devops/On call | REMOTE ok (Americas time zones) | https://ahrefs.com/jobs/devops-oncall We are looking for a Site Reliability Engineer with deep knowledge of Linux and distributed systems to help take care of its distributed crawler and ensure all systems are up and running 24/7. Working experience with bare-metal servers and ability to participate in daily on-call rotation are required. Our system is big…
Comment linking /skylake-bug-a-detective-story-ab1ad2beddcd
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring right now?”Submitted Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud (2023) as a story · 80 points
HN discussionAhrefs | OCaml developer | Singapore + San Francisco, CA | REMOTE ok, VISA ok (SG only), https://ahrefs.com/jobs/ocaml-server-side-developer We are looking for a backend developer with a deep understanding of networks, distributed systems, OS fundamentals and taste for simple and efficient architectural designs. Our backend is implemented in OCaml (and some C++), as such proficiency in OCaml is very much appreciated…
Comment linking /skylake-bug-a-detective-story-ab1ad2beddcd
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2017)”Submitted How Ahrefs Gets a Billion Dollar-Worth Infrastructure with a 90% Discount as a story · 65 points
HN discussionAhrefs | Oncall/Devops | Singapore + San Francisco, CA | REMOTE ok (preferably SG TZ), VISA ok (SG only), https://ahrefs.com/jobs/oncall-devops Ahrefs is looking for a oncall/devops to help take care of its distributed backend systems powered by 2000+ servers and ensure all systems are up and running 24/7. We require deep understanding of operating systems and networks fundamentals, practical knowledge of Linux and…
Comment linking /skylake-bug-a-detective-story-ab1ad2beddcd
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2017)”Submitted Ahrefs 15TB SSDs Failure Rate Statistics 2021 Q4 and 2022 Q1 as a story · 13 points
HN discussionAhrefs | OCaml developer / DevOps | Singapore + San Francisco, CA | REMOTE ok, VISA ok (SG only) Ahrefs runs an internet-scale bot that crawls the whole Web 24/7, storing huge volumes of information to be indexed and structured in a timely fashion. Backend system is powered by a custom petabyte-scale distributed key-value storage to accommodate all that data coming in at high speed. The storage system is implemented…
Comment linking /skylake-bug-a-detective-story-ab1ad2beddcd
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2017)”Submitted Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud as a story · 5 points
HN discussionRelated to this: https://tech.ahrefs.com/skylake-bug-a-detective-story-ab1ad2... Also a pretty good read and recently discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14661473
Comment linking /skylake-bug-a-detective-story-ab1ad2beddcd
on “I found a bug in Intel Skylake processors”Submitted Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud as a story · 5 points
HN discussionAhrefs | OCaml developer | Singapore + San Francisco, CA | REMOTE ok, VISA ok (SG only), https://ahrefs.com/jobs/ocaml-server-side-developer We are looking for a backend developer with a deep understanding of networks, distributed systems, OS fundamentals and taste for simple and efficient architectural designs. Our backend is implemented in OCaml (and some C++), as such proficiency in OCaml is very much appreciated…
Comment linking /skylake-bug-a-detective-story-ab1ad2beddcd
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2017)”Submitted Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud as a story · 5 points
HN discussionReminded me of the Intel Skylake bug found by the OCaml compiler developers: https://tech.ahrefs.com/skylake-bug-a-detective-story-ab1ad2...
Comment linking /skylake-bug-a-detective-story-ab1ad2beddcd
on “Intel Processor Instability Causing Oodle Decompression Failures”Submitted Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud as a story · 5 points
HN discussionDebian announcement https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2017/06/msg00308.html Ahrefs writeup https://tech.ahrefs.com/skylake-bug-a-detective-story-ab1ad2... The Intel spec update still labels SKL150 as No Fix but there is a microcode update available. Dunno exactly what to make of that distinction. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/core/desk... Can an x86 program detect whether this update has bee…
Comment linking /skylake-bug-a-detective-story-ab1ad2beddcd
on “How I found a bug in Intel Skylake processors (2017)”Submitted Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud as a story · 4 points
HN discussion>> somewhat It's a factor of 5 to 20 [1] in many cases. Regular hosting is unbelievably cheap, especially in high traffic environments. [1] https://tech.ahrefs.com/how-ahrefs-saved-us-400m-in-3-years-...
Comment linking /how-ahrefs-saved-us-400m-in-3-years-by-not-going-to-the-cloud-8939dd930af8
on “The demise of the mildly dynamic website (2022)”Submitted Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud (2023) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI have an European alternative, my own iron in my own home, it's European since I'm an EU citizen living in the EU... The alternative to the modern computing is the classic iron ownership instead of living on the shoulder of giants, otherwise there is no difference between a US company and an EU one selling the same services. They are both third party whose job is making money for their shareholders. "But.... HW cos…
Comment linking /how-ahrefs-gets-a-billion-dollar-worth-infrastructure-with-a-90-discount-5edd473b2399
on “European Alternatives”Submitted Ahrefs Saved $400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI think I was never convinced so I can't be disillusioned... In general terms: big tech know IT have started to be spread enough to makes people thinking back at classic desktops, hosting own services and so on, making their business model rooted on lock-in and others ignorance in a threat status. They have successfully pushed laptops, but have failed to go further with netbooks and mobile "the cloud-integrated plat…
Comment linking /how-ahrefs-gets-a-billion-dollar-worth-infrastructure-with-a-90-discount-5edd473b2399
on “Ask HN: Disillusioned after AI?”Submitted How Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud as a story · 2 points
HN discussionHere's the tracking-free version of OP's link: https://tech.ahrefs.com/how-ahrefs-saved-us-400m-in-3-years-...
Comment linking /how-ahrefs-saved-us-400m-in-3-years-by-not-going-to-the-cloud-8939dd930af8
on “Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud”Submitted Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud as a story · 2 points
HN discussionHere's the tracking-free version of OP's link: https://tech.ahrefs.com/how-ahrefs-saved-us-400m-in-3-years-...
Comment linking /how-ahrefs-saved-us-400m-in-3-years-by-not-going-to-the-cloud-8939dd930af8
on “Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud”Submitted Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud as a story · 2 points
HN discussion@dang: the original blog post by Ahrefs is much more informative and detailed. https://tech.ahrefs.com/how-ahrefs-saved-us-400m-in-3-years-...
Comment linking /how-ahrefs-saved-us-400m-in-3-years-by-not-going-to-the-cloud-8939dd930af8
on “Singapore software vendor says own hardware in colo costs $400M less than cloud”Submitted Ahrefs saved $400M in 3 years by not going to the cloud as a story · 2 points
HN discussionhttps://tech.ahrefs.com/how-ahrefs-saved-us-400m-in-3-years-... https://37signals.com/podcast/leaving-the-cloud-part-2/
Comment linking /how-ahrefs-saved-us-400m-in-3-years-by-not-going-to-the-cloud-8939dd930af8
on “The NixOS Foundation’s Call to Action: S3 Costs Require Community Support”Submitted How to get started with OCaml in 2022 as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
