Whether you’re a startup or an established business, keeping infrastructure costs low is crucial.
As you scale your operations, one of the first big decisions you’ll face is whether to host your workloads on cloud infrastructure or dedicated servers.
But is cloud actually cheaper than buying and managing your own servers?
The short answer is: it depends.
In some cases, cloud can provide serious cost savings compared to owning dedicated servers.
But in other scenarios, dedicated hardware may be more economical. There are many variables to consider that impact the total cost of ownership.
In this article, we’ll compare cloud hosting to dedicated servers primarily through a cost lens.
We’ll look at the pricing models of each, factors that influence costs, hidden fees to watch out for, and scenarios where one option is likely cheaper than the other.
Let’s dive in!
Before we compare costs, let’s briefly explain what cloud hosting and dedicated servers are.
What is cloud hosting?
Cloud hosting refers to renting virtualized compute resources from a public cloud provider like Cloudpap, AWS, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure.
The key characteristics of cloud infrastructure include:
- Pay as you go pricing – You pay only for the resources you provision and use without long term commitments. No need to purchase hardware upfront.
- On-demand scaling – Scale up or down servers and resources on the fly as needs change.
- Managed infrastructure – The cloud provider handles maintenance, updates, and uptime.
- Global availability – Resources can be spun up in data centers around the world.
With public cloud platforms, you essentially rent compute resources like:
- Virtual machines
- Block storage
- Load balancers
- Databases
- CDN
And only pay for what you use. Cloud infrastructure is managed and hosted remotely by the provider.
What are dedicated servers?
Dedicated servers refer to physical servers that are leased or purchased outright by an organization for their exclusive use.
Some key attributes:
- Bare metal hardware – Dedicated, physical server hardware that’s not shared with others.
- Self-managed – You configure, update, secure, and maintain the servers.
- Fixed resources – Spec’d resources like CPU, RAM, and storage are fixed.
- Single tenant – No noisy neighbors impacting performance.
- Upfront costs – Servers must be leased or purchased upfront for long term use.
Dedicated servers may be housed in a colocation facility offsite or on-premises.
But in either case, the organization has full control over the server hardware and is responsible for all management aspects.
Now that we’ve clarified the core concepts, let’s analyze how cloud and dedicated server costs actually compare.
Comparing costs of cloud vs dedicated servers
At a high level, cloud infrastructure follows a pay-as-you-go model while dedicated servers have upfront capital and ongoing management expenses.
But it’s not as simple as that.
The total cost of ownership for cloud vs dedicated can vary substantially based on your workload specifics.
Let’s break this down:
Cloud hosting cost structure
With cloud infrastructure, you only pay for the exact resources provisioned and time used.
The billing is typically granular based on:
- Compute instance type and hours run
- Storage amount and IOPS provisioned
- Bandwidth consumed
- Services like load balancing utilized
Pros
- No upfront investment in hardware
- Pay for only what you use
- Scale up or down on demand
- OpEx cost structure
Cons
- Hourly billing can get expensive for steady state usage
- Network egress bandwidth charges can add up
- Non-compute services are billed separately
Dedicated server cost structure
Dedicated servers have:
- Upfront CapEx to purchase or lease servers
- Ongoing fixed costs for colocation or data center space
- OpEx for power, cooling, and bandwidth
- Labour costs for internal infrastructure management
Pros
- No hourly billing fluctuations
- Hardware ownership provides tax advantages
- bandWidth within data center may be cheaper
- Performance contained to just your workload
Cons
- Large upfront investment
- Wasted resources if overprovisioned
- No easy way to scale up/down
- Higher human resource overhead
As you can see, cloud vs dedicated costs align with different business models.
Variable vs fixed expenses.
Opex vs Capex.
Next, let’s call out some specific cost factors.
Factors that impact costs
Determining if cloud or dedicated hosting is cheaper for your use case depends on several factors.
Let’s explore the key considerations:
Workload characteristics
The profile of your application workload heavily influences cost:
- Steady-state or spiky usage – Steady apps favor dedicated, while spiky apps are cheaper in the cloud.
- Peak traffic times – Cloud billing can be optimized by using fewer instances during off-peak periods. Dedicated resources are fixed 24/7.
- Growth trajectory – Rapid growth favors the cloud’s flexibility vs dedicated fixed resources.
Server specifications
- CPU and memory needs – Oversized dedicated servers waste resources. The cloud allows right-sized VMs.
- Storage and IOPS needs – Cloud storage is metered, while dedicated has fixed local disks.
- Uptime SLAs – Cloud uptime is slightly lower than dedicated typically.
- Geographic coverage – Cloud has global regions, dedicated limited to one site.
Usage time span
- Short-term usage – Cloud wins for short-term, temporary workloads.
- Long-term steady usage – Dedicated better suits apps with predictable long-term usage.
Team capabilities
- Infrastructure management – Dedicated servers require experienced sysadmin skills.
- Cloud vs on-prem preferences – Team skillset often dictates a preference.
Provider pricing and discounts
- Cloud pricing model – Prices fluctuate between cloud providers.
- Reserved instances – Significant cloud discounts for 1-3 yr commitments.
- Negotiated dedicated server – Prices can vary greatly between vendors.
There are clearly many intersecting variables that sway cost savings between cloud and dedicated.
Optimizing these factors is key to minimizing expenses.
Additional considerations beyond just cost
So far we’ve focused mostly on the hard costs of cloud infrastructure versus dedicated servers.
But there are several other factors beyond pure expense to weigh when choosing between these options:
Operational overhead
- Infrastructure management – Dedicated servers place a larger operational burden on your team for hardware maintenance, software updates, uptime monitoring, and security patching. Cloud platforms handle this operational work for you.
- Vendor management – With dedicated hardware, you may need to manage relationships with colocation vendors, hardware OEMs, and support contracts. Cloud simplifies to a single vendor.
- Scalability – Cloud platforms allow fast, API-driven infrastructure scaling. Growing dedicated capacity requires manual procurement and provisioning.
- Staffing requirements – Dedicated infrastructure demands a significant skilled headcount. Cloud reduces this burden.
Business agility
- Speed to deploy – Cloud environments can be spun up in minutes while procuring dedicated hardware takes weeks.
- Innovation velocity – Cloud’s rapid provisioning facilitates faster development cycles and innovation. Dedicated hardware slows things down.
- Global expansion – Cloud regions enable low friction worldwide growth. Dedicated is confined to initial geographic location.
Other considerations
- Hybrid options – Mixing dedicated hardware with cloud resources can provide the best of both worlds.
- Compliance – Highly regulated industries often favor dedicated servers for enhanced control and security.
- Capital vs operational expense – Dedicated provides CapEx depreciation benefits but higher OpEx. Cloud is purely OpEx.
As you can see, cost is just one piece of the overall equation when evaluating dedicated vs. cloud infrastructure.
When to choose cloud vs dedicated servers
Given all the variables we’ve covered, in what scenarios should you choose cloud or dedicated for your workloads?
Here are some best practice guidelines.
When the cloud is likely cheaper
Cloud infrastructure tends to provide more cost efficiency for:
- Unpredictable spiky workloads – Pay-per-use model best for uneven demand.
- Short term temporary infrastructure – Avoid dedicated server capital costs for short term needs.
- Development/testing environments – No need to overprovision expensive dedicated hardware for non-production uses.
- New applications with uncertain growth – Cloud flexibility is ideal when demand is hard to predict.
- Global microservices applications – Cloud regions provide low latency global reach.
- Businesses lacking infrastructure expertise – Avoid the specialized skills needed to build and run dedicated server farms.
When dedicated servers are likely cheaper
Dedicated hardware can be more cost effective for:
- Steady state long term applications – Avoid hourly cloud billing for consistent long term apps.
- Predictable workloads – Right-size dedicated servers without paying for cloud elasticity you don’t need.
- Single site simple infrastructure – Skip complexity and overhead of orchestrating global cloud regions.
- High memory or storage needs – Cloud memory and storage costs can exceed equivalent dedicated hardware.
- Strict uptime & security requirements – Dedicated hardware provides greater control over reliability and compliance.
- Organizations with infrastructure expertise – Leverage existing sysadmin skills rather than retraining for cloud.
The above are general guidelines – calculate TCO based on your specific use case.
And as mentioned, hybrid dedicated/cloud infrastructure can give you the best of both worlds.
Key Takeaways
- Cloud and dedicated costs align with different models – pay as you go vs fixed, Opex vs Capex.
- Workload characteristics like steady vs spiky usage heavily sway cost efficiency.
- Short term and development environments favor cloud, while long term production apps lean dedicated.
- Consider operational factors like skills, management burden, and business agility.
- Hybrid infrastructure combining cloud and dedicated resources can optimize spending.