How to reduce your Server / Hosting expenses
Last Updated on February 12, 2015 by Ruchir Shastri
We routinely communicate with customers who are very much interested in reducing their hosting expenses. However, there are few critical factors to consider when you look out for this which also includes degradation of quality of services which directly affects your business. I’ve created few points here which will help you in analyzing your current setup to ascertain if you have any scope for reducing your expenses
1) Consolidate Websites / Applications
If you have several websites in different hosting plans, you can check if you can upgrade your hosting plan subscription with existing provider and consolidate all websites in single plan – this can save your costs significantly along with reducing time spent on management of different website hosting subscriptions. In case you have services with multiple providers, you can consider to move them to a single provider who has been best in service quality.
2) Move on-premise servers to hosting providers / cloud
The cost involved in maintaining on-premise server is massive and is usually overlooked by corporate management. You need to consider power usage, backup power setup cost, uplink (public) connectivity cost, hardware spare management costs, networking gear costs, cooling unit costs, etc. when you have on-premise server(s). If you think this is negligible, you are wrong – these costs pile up massively and you can save significant amount if you move these servers to professional hosting provider along with ensuring that you receive better services out of similar servers. Professional hosting providers have enterprise grade setup / environment which has been specially setup / developed / maintained for servers along with regular maintenance of equipment performed. Additionally, the provider stocks up all spare hardware components along with ensuring that your server has the very latest components installed for best performance.
3) Move to Managed Services
Most organizations spend significant amount on IT staff for managing their servers – moving to managed services by professionals helps to reduce these costs massively. With managed services, your provider will manage everything inside your server which includes setup / provisioning, performing day to day management tasks, applying patches/updates to operating system, securing your server, performing daily backups, monitoring your server on 24/7 basis and performing routine security audits of your servers. All of this can be for a price range of as low as $40-$100/m per server. You can virtually get rid
of your entire IT staff after moving to a managed provider – this can essentially save you hundreds of thousands of dollars every year! A detailed write up on this is available at https://blog.softsyshosting.com/2014/07/04/managed-hosting-server-management-and-monitoring-services/
4) Virtualize your servers
In this current era of cloud computing, most organizations have benefitted from virtualizing their physical hardware by moving to Virtual Machines. A virtual machine performs similar to a dedicated server whereby you have full fledged operating system and you can perform all functions that you can on a physical server. With virtualization, you can have a high end physical server which can host multiple virtual machines – such a setup helps you in reducing your costs significantly. Virtualized environment helps in lowering the costs since:
- Less physical space is required.
- Lower power usage
- Significantly less maintenance / management costs
- Reduces time (and money) for managing servers
- It is highly scalable – you can easily upgrade / downgrade your virtual machines on the fly
You can understand from above points that these are fairly simple steps / changes in your setup that you can consider to undertake and thus reduce your expenses significantly along with ensuring that you get enterprise class setup which is of latest generation. You will also have access to the very best talent in industry with managed services who will keep your server safe, secure & backed up at all times.
At Softsys Hosting, we help our customers in reducing their expenses with various services which help their business grow flawlessly. We provide virtualized Windows VPS / Linux VPS plans along with dedicated server hosting. We also provide comprehensive server management services where our experts (available on 24/7 basis) handle all day to day management tasks along with monitoring your server, backups, security, etc. These administration services are available as an addon or with specialized managed Windows VPS hosting or managed server services.