Sage: Leaving the Cloud — Cloud Computing Isn’t For Everyone

Cloud computing isn't serverless; it's renting computers. Instead of owning and operating your own server hardware you're dependent on a third party. From the start, companies that offer cloud services promised simplicity and cost savings. We at Startr have had one foot in the cloud for two decades, and Startr.Space had been running there exclusively since it was launched. We’ve run extensively in both Amazon’s cloud and Google’s cloud, but the savings promised in reduced complexity never materialized. So we’ve left.

The rough math goes like this: the cloud costs on average 4x more than on-premises or colocation solutions. If we're spending $6,480 per month on cloud, that adds up to $77,760 per year. 4x that and we're looking at $311,040 per year. That's $233,280 more than if we were running on-premises!

The savings are clear. The more operations we have and move in-house, the more we save. If we spent $3.2m on cloud the cost of rack space and new hardware is a total of $840,000 per year. That's $2,360,000 in savings per year!

At a time when so many companies are looking to cut expenses, saving millions through hosting expenses sounds like a better first move than the rounds of layoffs that keep coming.