When Cloud Hosting Gets Too Expensive

Cloud hosting, when done properly, can be a pretty slick tool.  But more and more customers — especially startups — are discovering that cloud hosting is simply not cost effective past a point.  Unless you’re providing your own infrastructure (servers, network connections, datacenter, SAN, and backup power), cloud hosting costs can quickly balloon and become far greater than the cost of renting or co-locating multiple dedicated servers.

We recently worked with a customer who was paying over $600 / month for a mid-grade cloud instance with one of the more popular cloud providers.  His performance was suffering, and he (very smartly) wanted to shop around before committing to additional cloud resources.

For about one third less than he was currently paying, we were able to build a pair of high-availability dedicated servers.  With local RAID storage on each server, he received dedicated (translation: fast) I/O with built-in redundancy.  He had the full power of a state-of-the-art Haswell Xeon processor in each server, so application performance skyrocketed.  And because his second server was set up in a high-availability configuration, it automatically takes over if the first server encounters any problems.

Better application performance, better disk I/O, better control, less money.

Cloud hosting is great when done properly.  But there’s always a tipping point at which it simply becomes more cost effective to rent or co-locate your own dedicated servers (after all, that’s what cloud hosting environments are built on).  If you’re in a cloud hosting platform today, contact our sales department to find out how we can boost your performance AND save you money.