Is Cloud Better than Dedicated Server?

by Mike Ricotta - March 12, 2020

9 Questions to Help You Decide: Is Cloud Better than Dedicated Server for Your Business?

We asked Arcane Strategies’ engineers to come up with a 9 Question questionnaire to help business owners answer the question, “Is cloud better than dedicated server? These questions and answers will help participants learn about the capabilities and downsides of both Managed Cloud Support Providers and Dedicated Servers.

Click Here For Questionaire

This questionnaire goes over various parts of your business to determine what is most important, relevant to the Cloud vs Dedicated Server question. Hovering over answers will give a bit more information on what each answer represents or the benefits it has. Here is a bit more information on each question if you aren’t sure why it’s important.

Cloud vs Dedicated Server Questionnaire Breakdown

1. How fast do you need the server?
   • Time is money and that is no different when it comes to building an IT infrastructure.  If timing is a factor, cloud providers have pre-built images you can use for instant deployment.  If not, you have the luxury of investing time in a full build.
2. Does your business have compliance requirements?
   • To make sure you set up an infrastructure that meets your compliance requirements, you might choose the path of a full build or target cloud providers who specialize in your need.
3. What are your most important configuration, management, and support needs?
   • Weigh the importance of scalability, speed, security, and management costs, among others.  They’ll help you determine which direction to go.
4. Are you running high input/output workloads, such as massive databases?
   • Making sure your servers are up at busy times of the month, week, or even day can make or break your business.  Building to support large volumes of persistent connections may require a specialized cloud service or qualified/experienced administrator.
5. How consistent is demand?
   • While your business may not have monthly demand changes, yearly demand changes are also something to consider.  Building for burstable traffic or constant load will take you down different pathways in your build.
6. Do you anticipate specific upgrades?
   • The frequency and impact of upgrades have varying levels of costs whether that’s sys admin labor, downtime impact, or even developer labor.  Don’t be penny-wise and dollar-foolish; you want to reduce your maintenance costs but maintain control over which upgrades are potentially hazardous to your custom applications/services.
7. Does your organization need CapEx vs. OpEx pricing?
   • Does your business focus on long-term benefits or keeping operating costs down?
8. Do you currently spend more than $2,400 annually in IT personal and maintenance?
   • Running these servers requires highly trained personnel and that can cost you more than $10k/mo.  In general, an MSP will cost you very little, so we’ve given you a benchmark for what that cost looks like over a year.  If you’re spending more than that, an MSP is probably your solution.
9. Do you expect over $2,000 in yearly hardware expenses?
   • Leading cloud instances can help you reduce hardware costs if your hardware infrastructure is expansive enough.  This value is just a general benchmark to consider.

So, Is The Cloud Right for Your Business?

After you have selected your answers for all of these questions, simply click “Calculate” to be shown our suggested path forward. Depending on your answers you could be recommended to purchase an On-Prem Server or a Cloud Hosted Server.

A Dedicated Server will be a larger upfront and maybe a higher TCO but, it will give you the complete control and ownership which your business may need. Setting up a dedicated server might take a bit longer than you are willing to wait though. If that is the case, Arcane Strategies can help fill the gap. Contact us today to learn how Arcane can make a Dedicated Server build into a painless process.

A Managed Cloud Support Provider, like Arcane Strategies, can provide your business with cutting-edge technologies for a fraction of the cost to build and maintain them in-house. Whether it is a web app, database, or custom solution, Arcane has the developers and resources to make sure your business is ready. You can learn more about what we do on our Services or Products pages

So you have the answer to “Is the cloud right for my business?”, now what? You can sign up for Arcane’s Managed Services right now on The Arcane Store. Sign up today to get the best deal on top of the line Managed Service contract.

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• Check out our VPS vs dedicated server article and questionnaire, too!

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