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It's weird because when I compare the pricing of cloud compared to our current setup, the cloud always comes out cheaper. I think this is the main thing I am lo

It's weird because when I compare the pricing of cloud compared to our current setup, the cloud always comes out cheaper. I think this is the main thing I am looking at currently. We pay around £1400 a month for our hosting at the minute. This entails 1 DB server, 2 Web servers, 1 mail server, a load balancer and some other tricks like a SAN and a NAS. Comparing that to the likes of Azure where I would only need 2 web servers (for redundancy) and SQL azure, the cost comes in at around 1/2 of what I am paying now. I always feel like there is going to be a stinger somewhere in that when we move it all over, we get some stupid high bill for something that I didn't take into account or was not obvious.

Silhouette 14y ago
I assume from the currency that you're in the UK like me. In that case, it sounds like your current hosting is on the expensive side, unless perhaps you have particularly high-spec servers or transfer very large amounts of data that you didn't mention before. FWIW, I suggest spending a few minutes looking up what a couple of other hosting services would charge you for a similar set-up today, assuming you haven't done so lately. I'd be a bit surprised if you couldn't save a substantial amount of money each month for a relatively simple set-up like the one you described.
- chrislomax 14y ago
  Our main out goings are software licenses to be honest. SQL has gone up to 240 per CPU now which racks up. Thanks for the advice though as I will certainly look around. I do like the propspect of te cloud though and instant scaling which is why I was looking at cloud solutions anyway
  - seunosewa 14y ago
    You're comparing apples and Oranges. SQL Server costs the same amount on Amazon EC2 if you use it.
    - chrislomax 14y ago
      Well we were thinking of using SQL Azure. It's £50 for a 20gb db. This gives you triple redundancy. To get this type of redundancy in a hosted platform would be at least 3 sql licenses and 3 machines to put them on and manage the failover layers I wasn't thinking of using SQL in aws, although it is slightly cheaper
awj 14y ago
One general trend in cloud hosting is to have multiple sources of the cost for a system. For instance with EC2 you have a per hour price for the virtual server and a per gigabyte price for data transfer. If you want any kind of permanent storage that's a separate thing with it's own per gigabyte stored and per gigabyte transferred costs. Not only is it easy to miss these, but they're not things you pay as much attention to in a typical hosted server environment.
sorenbs 14y ago
Be sure to compare servers with the same performance. EC2 servers are pretty slow, and generally way more expensive than dedicated machines.

Silhouette 14y ago

I assume from the currency that you're in the UK like me. In that case, it sounds like your current hosting is on the expensive side, unless perhaps you have particularly high-spec servers or transfer very large amounts of data that you didn't mention before. FWIW, I suggest spending a few minutes looking up what a couple of other hosting services would charge you for a similar set-up today, assuming you haven't done so lately. I'd be a bit surprised if you couldn't save a substantial amount of money each month for a relatively simple set-up like the one you described.

chrislomax 14y ago
Our main out goings are software licenses to be honest. SQL has gone up to 240 per CPU now which racks up. Thanks for the advice though as I will certainly look around. I do like the propspect of te cloud though and instant scaling which is why I was looking at cloud solutions anyway
- seunosewa 14y ago
  You're comparing apples and Oranges. SQL Server costs the same amount on Amazon EC2 if you use it.
  - chrislomax 14y ago
    Well we were thinking of using SQL Azure. It's £50 for a 20gb db. This gives you triple redundancy. To get this type of redundancy in a hosted platform would be at least 3 sql licenses and 3 machines to put them on and manage the failover layers I wasn't thinking of using SQL in aws, although it is slightly cheaper

awj 14y ago

One general trend in cloud hosting is to have multiple sources of the cost for a system. For instance with EC2 you have a per hour price for the virtual server and a per gigabyte price for data transfer. If you want any kind of permanent storage that's a separate thing with it's own per gigabyte stored and per gigabyte transferred costs. Not only is it easy to miss these, but they're not things you pay as much attention to in a typical hosted server environment.

sorenbs 14y ago

Be sure to compare servers with the same performance. EC2 servers are pretty slow, and generally way more expensive than dedicated machines.