Cloud data hosting has become a fact of life. No business can thrive without relying on some kind of cloud data service. The only problem? There are a bunch of services that are basically overcharging for their cloud packages by introducing a few bells and whistles that you likely won’t need or use.
Do you really need the fastest SSDs in the world? Probably not. Just like that, there are a few other things that ultimately lead businesses to bleed money on something that’s a long-term and even permanent need of the business.
Naturally, statistics show that more than half of businesses seek to optimize their hosting costs. Otherwise, you might end up wasting a lot of money. The same research found that the average monthly price for basic cloud hosting is $8.47. But that’s not the cost that the majority of businesses are familiar with. It’s not rare to find businesses paying much more than that figure.
So, with that in mind, we’re going to talk about the various time-tested cost optimization strategies that you can rely on. If you’re already pretty close to the global average, then you can bring your costs down further! Without further ado, let’s dive right into it.
Rightsizing Your Resources
Finding the Goldilocks zone is very important. And it differs from industry to industry and business to business. Imagine paying for a king-size bed when a twin would suffice. The same principle applies to cloud resources. So, how do you go about doing this?
Well, first of all, you have to analyse your website traffic patterns and resource usage. Don’t worry about rising resource usage in the future as whatever provider you choose will most likely offer a further discount when you upgrade to a better package.
A core part of the analysis is also looking at what you’re not using enough of. Are you consistently underutilizing your current virtual machine (VM) size? Downsizing to a more appropriate size can yield significant cost savings without compromising website performance. Similarly, check all resources and come up with your approximate use case with a little bit of buffer.
Cloud providers like AWS offer tools like Amazon CloudWatch to monitor resource utilization and identify opportunities for rightsizing.
Reserved Instances
Think of reserved instances (RIs) like committing to a year-long gym membership at a discounted rate. With RIs, you prepay for cloud resources like VMs for a fixed term (usually one or three years) at a significantly reduced cost compared to on-demand pricing.
It’s particularly good for businesses that have predictable workloads. Over time, you will realize just how substantial the savings are as long as your resource requirements are consistent. And that brings us to the problem they have.
RIs come with a commitment. As such, you must have a clear understanding of your ongoing resource needs before you opt for such a strategy. Otherwise, you will be limiting your workload to fit within the RI’s maximum limits or wasting even more money in switching and migrating your data.
Software & Code Optimizations
Now, let’s go beyond the hardware. Your cloud hosting costs aren’t solely determined by the hardware you use or the cloud service provider you sign up for. The website’s code and underlying software also play a pivotal role.
Depending on your particular website and what technologies or libraries it’s using, your exact process of streamlining the code will differ greatly from that of another website. Once it’s done, code streamlining will effectively reduce resource requirements. This will, in turn, lead to more cost reductions as your requests to the server are lighter.
You should also consider caching mechanisms to reduce database load and potentially allow for downsizing your database instances.
Elasticity Without Excess
Using auto-scaling can lead to what we call elasticity without excess. Though you can’t have a team that magically scales up during peak hours and shrinks back down during slower periods, that is possible with your cloud resource usage with auto-scaling.
You can set up predefined thresholds and configure your cloud environment to automatically scale your VMs up or down based on real-time traffic demands. When you do this, you will always have sufficient resources to handle surges without paying for idle capacity during low-traffic periods. Tools like AWS Auto Scaling and Azure Autoscale can help you do this.
In Conclusion
Cloud hosting offers unparalleled scalability and flexibility for businesses, but managing costs can be a challenge. Hopefully, the practical strategies outlined in this guide will help you get closer or even lower than the global average monthly cost of cloud hosting.
Don’t forget to use your cloud provider’s cost management tools to get granular insights into your spending patterns. For example, Azure Cost Management and AWS Cost Explorer can both help immensely in finding patterns.
Lastly, if your workload can tolerate occasional interruptions, you might want to look into spot instances. These are interruptible but deeply discounted offers for unused capacity. Every provider, from AWS and Azure to Google Cloud and Oracle, offers spot instances or VMs.
