That server humming in the closet felt like a smart buy three years ago. Today it’s a single point of failure with no offsite backup, aging drives, and a power bill. Here’s how to think about moving it to the cloud — without overpaying for capacity you’ll never use.
What you’re really paying for with on-prem
Hardware is the cheap part. The real cost is everything around it: power and cooling, the UPS, patching and updates, the drive that fails on a holiday weekend, and the fact that one flood or fire takes the whole thing out. A closet server has no redundancy and, usually, no tested restore.
When a cloud VM is the obvious win
- You want it backed up offsite and actually recoverable.
- You’d rather scale specs with a few clicks than buy a new box.
- You don’t want to be the one driving in at 2 a.m. for a reboot.
When colocation still makes sense
If you’ve already invested in hardware or need specific physical control, you don’t have to give that up — colocation puts your gear in our datacenter with redundant power, cooling, and bandwidth, and remote hands so you stay out of the building.
Not sure which fits? That’s a five-minute conversation. Tell us what you’re running and we’ll point you to the cheaper, more reliable option — even if it isn’t the biggest one.