A week or so back, I posted a case study where a company called Imageloop
managed to save 2/3rds of their fixed monthly costs by moving from web hosting
to cloud hosting. The idea of tapping into the cloud for hosting purposes always
had a strong business case even though many small businesses are not aware of such an advantage.
Two weeks back I asked a question in Twitter
The response to this tweet ranged from people saying that going with a data
center is much cheaper than hosting on a Cloud infrastructure like AWS to people
wondering if any startup will ever reach the size of Google or Microsoft. In
fact, it is a big myth that Cloud infrastructure costs more than a startup
building its own data center(s).
Few days after this discussion on Twitter, Kent Langley of nScaled sent me a whitepaper on
the same topic. I thought I will talk about it in this space as it is pertinent
to the point I am trying to make here. This whitepaper talks about how SaaS
vendors can use Cloud Computing, instead of their own data center or co-location
or managed hosting, to benefit from cost savings to security to scalability.
They make a complete business case to host SaaS applications on the Cloud
instead of traditional hosting methods.
SaaS vendors can have the following advantages by using Cloud hosting
- Huge cost savings which can be transferred to R&D and/or also as cost
savings to customers - Lower barrier to entry and hence higher opportunities for startups of any
size to jump in - Easy to scale during peak demands
- Faster provisioning of newer resources
- Better performance
According to the nScaled Whitepaper, the cost savings in Cloud hosting,
compared to co-location, can run as high as 53%, a whopping number in the
startup dynamics. It only makes a good business case to use Cloud hosting and
any arguments against it on the cost front is simply meaningless. In a highly
competitive market, any company that saves 53% in their costs over their
competitors is bound to be a success.
I strongly recommend you to get the whitepaper from nScaled and go through the numbers to
understand the cost advantage of Cloud hosting over traditional hosting methods.
I don’t see a case where traditional hosting can ever offer such huge cost
savings but if you know of any case study, feel free to add it to the comments
and I will be glad to take a look at it.
SaaS applications have certain peculiarities that make it a stronger case for cloud hosting.
Not sure if numbers from SaaS applications can be generalized to general web hosting scenario.
My 2 cents.