It is the question we are asked most and the one the industry answers worst, because almost everybody has an incentive to answer it in one particular direction. Let us try to do it with numbers.
What usually works out better in the cloud
- Workloads that are variable or unpredictable: if you need four times the power for two months a year, paying for it all year round is throwing money away.
- Projects that are new or short-lived: test environments, pilots, campaigns.
- The need to grow fast with no purchasing or installation lead time.
- Companies with no decent server room: if you have no UPS, no cooling and no proper network, your own server is a breakdown waiting its turn.
What usually works out better on-premises
- Workloads that are stable and predictable for years on end: that is where renting ends up costing more than buying.
- Volumes of large amounts of data that move about a lot: egress traffic in the public cloud is charged for, and you notice it.
- Applications that require very low latency to local machinery or devices.
- Legal or client requirements that impose a specific location for the data.
The costs almost nobody adds up
When somebody compares “your own server” with “the cloud”, they usually compare the price of the hardware with the monthly bill. Things are missing on both sides.
- On-premises: electricity, UPS, cooling, licences, disk replacement, and people’s hours to keep it running.
- On-premises: the cost of the breakdown. A server with no 24/7 support and no spare parts can leave you down for three days.
- In the cloud: egress traffic, backups, snapshots, static IPs and managed services that keep adding up.
- In the cloud: the cost of leaving. Migrating 20 TB out of a provider is neither free nor quick.
What we usually propose
With most of the small businesses we work with, what comes out in the end is a hybrid: the stable, heavy workloads on-premises or with a dedicated hosting provider, and in the public cloud whatever benefits from elasticity — offsite backups, test environments, email and collaboration. Not as a middle-of-the-road compromise, but because each piece goes wherever it is cheapest and safest.
And whatever the decision, one non-negotiable condition: you must be able to leave. Documentation of the architecture, your data in standard formats and no artificial locks. If a provider makes that difficult, that is all the information you need about them.
