Costs of AWS vs. Physical Servers

Many businesses feel that using AWS cloud solutions will be the best fit for all their infrastructural needs. The AWS is undeniably a leading cloud platform which has been widely accepted by most businesses, but the truth is that there are many more in the market which offer much cheaper solutions. Moreover, many of these affordable alternatives may actually prove to be better for certain businesses. This is true as there are many businesses that are not being able to use the AWS cloud services properly or they fail to extract the best out of AWS.

– According to studies of costs between signing up for AWS cloud solutions as against standard servers it is seen that the AWS on-demand instances have been almost 300% costlier than if businesses had used traditional servers in those cases. Moreover, the use of AWS Reserved Instances has also been found to be about 250% costlier than if you were to get physical servers instead on contractual basis for the same period of time.

AWS Migration

In addition to the rates of cloud hosting services offered by cloud vendors, the costs of data transfer on the cloud is quite high. So, the workloads that demand higher bandwidth turn out to be costly on the cloud. When you select a dedicated hosting service, you are likely to be allocated a bandwidth of around 10 TB. On the contrary, when you avail an AWS cloud server, you will have to spend nearly 700 pounds for the same amount of data transfer. So, when you need only a handful of servers, it is recommended that you go for cheaper service providers.

AWS vs Cloud Server Cost

– Another key difference between the AWS cloud instances and physical servers are that the dedicated server hosting providers of AWS services are far costlier than hosts offering dedicated hosting. Incidentally, costs for the cloud servers are as high as 450%.

– Besides the rates of cloud hosting services offered by cloud vendors, the costs of bandwidth or rate of data transfer on the cloud is much more expensive. This automatically implies that workloads which have higher bandwidth needs will turn out to be very costly. When you sign up for dedicated hosting plans from a host, you are likely to be allotted about 10TB along with a dedicated server. When you compare the costs of getting this with a cloud server, you will see that it runs into nearly 700 pounds a month in the AWS for the same amount of traffic. This is why when you need only a handful of servers for your business it is better to go for the cheaper providers in the market.

– When you invest in AWS spot instances or pre-built physical servers costs are somewhat at par. The outcomes depend on prices of resources and availability of resources. Usage costs of Amazon EFS for storage for a single month would be about 131.79 pounds for 1100GB while for a NAS server it would be about 120 pounds for 14TB. So, the latter can offer almost 13 times greater storage at far lower costs.

– AWS vs Dedicated Server Cost (Go4hosting) 

When you compare the costs of running traditional dedicated servers which use MySQL with AWS-managed RDBS, you will see the costs are almost six times lesser when compared to running databases in AWS.

– These comparisons between physical servers and AWS servers help us understand that the AWS instances are best suited for cases which need multi-region redundancy and resiliency. These will have minimum resource needs because they will reduce management overheads. So, any small but complex hosting platform will become more affordable on AWS.

AWS vs Physical Server Cost

–The above comparisons between physical severs and AWS cloud servers suggest that AWS instances are better suited for cases which require multi-region redundancy and resiliency. These will have minimum resource needs as they will trim down overheads. That’s why any small but complex hosting platform will be more affordable on AWS.

– The AWS comes up with proprietary solutions which can be of much use to application developers. They cut down the requirements for huge amounts of infrastructure. But when signing up for the trends in future for public cloud solutions, one must take into account factors like vendor lock-ins, disaster recovery plans, and data accessibility etc.

So, we can see comparable infrastructural cost differences between the AWS instances and the traditional servers. Most of the costs are seen to be higher on AWS cloud. This high cost can be justified by the fact that clients subscribing to AWS will not need support at all. However, this notion is not completely true. Support is definitely needed, even if it is acquired in a different way. For instance, you cannot completely cut down all your IT staff members when you move to the AWS. This is something which you cannot do simply because you will need the staff to manage your internal users. They will also work with app vendors to render app supports or fixes. This is carried out side by side with environment and infrastructure maintenance tasks. When all apps are shifted to the AWS, all the maintenance responsibility is not automatically shifted. The environment continues to be monitored as it must keep running smoothly. In fact, the internal staff will now need to know how the AWS works. When traditional servers are shifted to AWS instances, you will continue to need support and monitoring services as before.

AWS vs VPS Cost

In short, the staff continues to be important as always; they just work in a different way and they learn how to do things in the AWS fashion. This AWS approach is easy to learn when you enroll for certification programs. The bottom line is that adopting AWS is not a lightweight move as it is believed to be. At times, when support is needed, the AWS is found to be lacking and companies have to get third party advisors which in turn escalates the costs. This proves that the idea that AWS server costs are always less and they do not need support is not entirely true.

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About Abhay Singh (65 Posts)