: Cloud hosting vs self hosting price I was looking at some cloud hosting price. Consider an entry level self hosted server: PRICE: 40€ ---------- CPU: i5 (4x 2.66 GHz) RAM: 16GB hard disk: 2TB

@Becky754

Selecting the right hosting infrastructure for your project can be challenging. To make matters worse, there is no standards in the "cloud" world. Different virtualization approaches can impact performance even with the same apparent specifications. So comparisons based on metrics alone often fail.

The same is true with the dedicated market. An Intel I5 CPU is a desktop/laptop CPU not a server grade CPU. When I see this used in dedicated servers, I know there is cost-cutting going on. You can easily see the CPU as a cost cutting measure but whatever items are being cut.

My general advice is to start small and test. Once you have benchmarks for your application you can better pick your hosting.

From a pure budget standpoint, you will get more compute and disk IO per dollar (euro) with dedicated hardware but typically lose scalability.

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@YK1175434

Definitely, you are omitting many factors. I'll provide brief outline of major points.

Hardware pros:


custom hardware allow unlimited creativity
hardware expenditures are approaching minimum possible as your hardware demands grow (like mathematical limit)


Hardware cons:


you have to add management costs to hardware costs
while your demands are small (I mean less that 10 servers, not a 3-page website), you still might need hardware (e.g. for essential load balancing if you don't want to use software load balancing)
server provisioning is not an immediate process thus in moment of peak load you'll either experience lags or you'll pay for unused hardware all month


In regard to cloud offering, just invert all points (with some grade of adequacy).

In regard to your comparison, SERVER (let's call it so) is not:


connected to top-tier network
build as rack-based machine, but generic tower PC (servers use XEON only if we are talking about Intel)
your data will reside on non-redundant non-SCSI storage (SATA without RAID)


Again, invert everything for cloud.

For a real hosting, see StackOverflow hosting.

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