The cloud isn’t new. It’s been around for a really long time. But what we know as “the cloud” really took off back in the early 2000s when Amazon built scalable infrastructure for their own needs and realized they could sell it to others. Microsoft shortly followed along with Google and Oracle. As great as the cloud is and as easy as it is to provision resources, it comes with a cost. Many organizations are leaving the cloud and migrating back to traditional hosting and data centers to get their costs back under control. Or they’re starting to look at a private cloud solution.
The hidden costs of the cloud
When you shop around for cloud, it’s easy to just look at the cost of the compute you’re going to use. Let’s start with AWS. One of the most common sizes that people go for is the t2.medium. This is a 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, and it comes in at $20.95/month – reserved. This actually isn’t too bad when you think about it – our 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM VPS goes for $19/month. But hold on. Our calculations aren’t done yet. We need to add storage to our cloud server. We’ll do an apples-to-apples comparison, so we’re going to add 80 GB of standard SSD storage. Next, we need to factor in bandwidth – because believe it or not, bandwidth is not included! Inbound bandwidth is free, so we won’t count that. Outgoing bandwidth is where we’re charged. We’ll say 20 GB.
On AWS, our estimated total is $30.75/month, but this is if we commit to 1 year. Remember, this could fluctuate because some months we might get less traffic while others we might get more. If you go with on-demand pricing, our instance will be $33.872000. Once we add our storage and bandwidth, we’re looking at $43.67/month. Meanwhile at NodeSpace, your cost is a static $19.00/month.
Now what good is a service without support? At NodeSpace, support is included! Just open a ticket and we’re here to help. AWS on the other hand… There are several support plans to choose from. For simplicity, we’re going to compare with the business level support as this is similar to what we offer (for free!). This gets tricky. So assuming your AWS spend is less than $100, you will spend $100 per month for this service, but just like your income tax, it’s tiered. $0-$10k is billed at 10% of your monthly spend. So if you spend $10,000/month, your support costs are $1,000/month.
Build your own cloud – for less
When we say you can build your own cloud, you might start seeing dollar signs flash before your eyes, but what if we told you it was cheaper than you think? With our Proxmox solutions, you can easily build out a private cloud. Cloud means scaling and flexibility. Proxmox gives this flexibility. You can do a ton more than you think! On the surface, Proxmox offers support for Ansible and Terraform. At the most basic level, this will give you everything you need to start going and creating a cloud. From here, you can expand out – from VXLAN, private networking, clustering, and more! We can help you achieve your goals for less!
