We all like saving right? It’s always good to have a good look into your business expenses and see where you are leaking funds. Hosting, if done wrong, can be one of those wallet-consuming costs. But how to prevent this and what can you do about it? In this post I will explain you some basic tips to get a grib on your hosting expenses.
Cloud isn’t everything
You hear a lot of fuzz about “cloud”. Let me first explain to you that “cloud” is not some misterious thing. The word cloud is a marketing gimmick and means that your data is stored in a datacenter on one or spread on several servers. It really depends how to provider looks at cloud. We have seen “cloud” offers that are all hosted on one server without backup options and then you have the Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure etc, which have pros and cons. We hear a lot of complaints about the costs of cloud providers once your company grows and starts using more hardware.
Watch cloud providers costs
Cloud providers like AWS can be cheap in the start, and mostly they give a lot of credit away for free, but when you actively start using your hosting you might be better off colocating your own hardware setup in a datacenter as this can save you a whole lot of money. So it would really serve you to look well ahead of the real costs of those so-called cloud plans.
Unmanaged vs managed
If you do not have the knowledge of maintaining servers and/or networks, it might be a good solution to look into managed hosting. Why? This will save you a lot of employees costs as you do not have to hire a system engineer to setup everything for you and maintain everything for you. Most providers offer some kind of Service Level Agreement to maintain your network and hardware for you. If you already have system engineers in place and you have a quite big setup, then managed services would not be needed for you and you can simply look into bare metal servers. Bare metal servers are mostly quite cheaper than managed servers as the provider only has to provide you with hardware and network access.
Look into scalable plans
It’s really a good idea to buy a hosting, server or any managed plan on a scalable optio. This means that you can scale up or scale down whenever you need it. For instance: you start out with 3 bare metal servers and business goes well, so you want to add 2 more servers right away. Some providers require you to sign yearly agreements, which will cause a problem when after 3 months you don’t require the extra servers anymore and you have to pay for another 9 months for unused servers. So it’s best to look for a provider which has no long term contract agreements in case you are looking for scalable hosting solutions. This does not mean you are forced to go to Amazon or Microsoft. There are quite some providers, just like HostSlim, that offer this for very affordable prices.
And finally I want to give you a firm warning. It might look in this post that I am trying to say that you should go as cheap as possible. This is not the solution i’m trying to convince you of. Always use common sense. When something looks too good to be true, then get a second opinion with another provider or two and request some quotes there and compare them. Then it’s up to you if you go with the cheapest provider, or the provider that’s not too expensive but reasonable priced. Look up some reviews on the company online as well and if you are in a position to do so, visit their datacenter and ask for a guide around. If everything is well taken care of the provider would have no problem to show you.