The author talks about using their own infrastructure and open source alternatives but that's a revisionist fantasy. They would have never gotten off the ground as a start up by buying a bunch of servers and spending time spinning up infrastructure. Not to mention they would have been paying the full costs of their bandwidth from the start.
The real lesson to learn here is to never hit a paid service going through a domain you don't control. DNS and proxy tricks would have saved the day.
The real lesson to learn here is to never hit a paid service going through a domain you don't control. DNS and proxy tricks would have saved the day.