Hosting Costs on the Cloud

If your eyes glazed over the first time you read the fine print on cloud hosting costs, you are not alone.  Rest assured.  I took up the challenge as though I were reading a non-fiction best seller; there was plenty of fine print to create a hefty book!

The first thing to note about cloud hosting is that you lease space much like you lease an apartment.  The unit can be unfurnished or furnished, utilities may be included in the rent or not, parking may be extra, you may pay by the month or a pay a yearly rent broken into twelve equal installments.

On the cloud you can lease one or more of the following services:

• Server with operating system, # of processors, and RAM.  Servers come in fixed units such as micro, small, medium, large, and x-large, each with a upper ceiling on resources
• Relation database service such as MySQL
• Database space and DB resources
• Unstructured data service such as MongoDB and Hadoop  and related space
• Document storage
• Disaster recovery services for your server and database

Based on how much data will go back and forth between your end-users and the application on the cloud or between application components such as the transactional side and the data warehouse side, you can decide how much bandwidth you need.

Just as you would expect in renting an apartment, pay-as-you-go costs more but you have no fixed financial commitments, but your costs will depend on duration and usage.  With an annual commitment, expect upfront costs and a fixed monthly cost.

So how do you start?

Consider pay-as-you-go for a short time period until you can compute how much resource/space you really need.    Pay close attention to the upper ceilings for each service and the bandwidth for data transfer that you have selected and vet those against the expected usage.  Switching between leasing units such as micro, small, medium etc. is easy, so no harm in starting small and scaling up.  Remember with both pay-as-you-go and an annual commitment, you can add services at any time.  With an annual commitment removing a service...umm...tough.