Tips to save Cloud / On Premise Server Costs
2 min readMay 29, 2022
One question business heads always ask “Should we host our servers on the cloud or within our premises? What would be cost effective?”
The solution lies in answers to many questions.
- Are you hosting a public facing server or an internal server like dev, testing, file etc.? If the answer is an “internal server” then the choice is clear. Host it within your premises. As per my experience, keeping servers on the cloud costs 8 times more than buying and keeping it in house. If you don’t want to spend upfront, and the requirement is for a few days, then cloud could be explored.
- If you are hosting a public facing server, are you aware of the number of hits / users it needs to handle? If the answer is “Yes”, then it is again better to host it within your premises. If you are not sure of the load, or you need to scale up the server as and when needed, then cloud is the answer.
- Now that you have decided to host some servers on the cloud, which cloud provider should you go in for? AWS, Azure, GCP, Digital Ocean, Scaleway….so many options. From the pricing perspective, it is almost same for all the providers. Cost optimisation lies in knowing what is your server going to serve. For example, if your servers are going to serve videos (and latency is not a big concern) then I would recommend getting a virtual server at Scaleway which gives you unlimited high speed bandwidth. Hosting such a server on AWS / Azure / GCP will empty your pocket as they charge on Internet data transfer for each GB. Oops. (by the way, I don’t intend to sell Scaleway here)
- Within a cloud provider, make sure you select the right virtual server instance you need. For example, virtual servers with AMD processors are cheaper than the ones with Intel processors.
- If you need a cloud server for a considerable amount of time, then going in for reserved instances would help you save costs. However, for such instances, I recommend going in for on premise servers only.
If you have any other ideas, please do share them with me.
This is not an exhaustive list and there is no “one size fits all” solution. In case you are looking to optimise your server costs, just message me.
