# Why We're Leaving the Cloud - hey.com Synced: [[2024_06_01]] 11:21 AM Last Highlighted: [[2024_06_01]] ![rw-book-cover](https://world.hey.com/dhh/avatar-20210222112907000000-293866624) Summary: Basecamp and HEY have decided to leave the cloud due to high costs and lack of complexity savings for medium-sized companies with stable growth. The cloud is beneficial for simple, low-traffic applications or irregular usage patterns, but not for companies like theirs. They believe in owning hardware, predictability, and decentralization for the future of the internet. ## Highlights [[2024_06_01]] [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hz9hdat826d4m2ft6weadyw3) > The cloud excels at two ends of the spectrum, where only one end was ever relevant for us. The first end is when your application is so simple and low traffic that you really do save on complexity by starting with fully managed services. [[2024_06_01]] [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hz9he02a99bfw42arp5x1ekd) > The second is when your load is highly irregular. When you have wild swings or towering peaks in usage. When the baseline is a sliver of your largest needs. Or when you have no idea whether you need ten servers or a hundred. [[2024_06_01]] [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hz9hfb78g839279f44gy6e9r) > Sure, but you have to manage these machines! The cloud is so much simpler! The savings will all be there in labor costs! Except no. Anyone who thinks running a major service like HEY or Basecamp in the cloud is "simple" has clearly never tried. Some things are simpler, others more complex, but on the whole, I've yet to hear of organizations at our scale being able to materially shrink their operations team, just because they moved to the cloud. [[2024_06_01]] [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hz9hgjfcb2g0eckceasdnwyz) > It's also about what kind of internet we want to operate in the future. It strikes me as downright tragic that this decentralized wonder of the world is now largely operating on computers owned by a handful of mega corporations. If one of the primary AWS regions go down, seemingly half the internet is offline along with it.