Businesses running on the cloud know that a significant chunk of their overall business budget goes into paying the cloud costs. These extended cloud costs, if not controlled, can impact your business’s fiscal position negatively in the long run. Companies can regulate the price by opting for some basic yet intelligent strategies. Such practices can help reduce cloud costs, and businesses can utilize this amount in other areas to support business growth.
There are a few ways an organization can save up on cloud costs and still enjoy the best cloud services required to run business operations smoothly.
7 Practices to Follow to Reduce Cloud Costs
Let’s learn about different exciting and practical ways to reduce overall cloud costs while still harnessing the benefits of the cloud.
1. Regular Cost Audits
Evaluating the cloud spending regularly by auditing the overall usage vs. spending will help identify inefficiencies and optimize costs. When any company conducts an audit, they realize that they might be paying for resources and services that are not even in use or there is no need for such resources. Regular cost audits will give the best idea about the top services, storage, apps, and resources they can’t avoid. But it will also help the user find out the apps and resources their business can do without and can be eradicated to save money.
2. Choosing the Right Cloud Type
Choosing the exemplary cloud service is critical to make the most for your business while saving up some costs on the go. Since different cloud types offer different sets of benefits and services, and not all clouds are created equal, it’s vital to know which cloud type suits your business model the best. For instance, if your business deals with data and heavy applications that require much bandwidth, go with the public cloud as it is the most scalable. Some public cloud hosting providers like Ace Cloud Hosting offers an ever-scalable public cloud that provides nearly unlimited bandwidth.
However, private and hybrid cloud infrastructures might be better choices for those who want the entire cloud space dedicated only to their business. So, figure out your specific business needs and make sure to select the correct type of cloud service for your workloads.
3. Choosing a Cost-effective Option
Negotiate discounts with your providers – many providers offer volume discounts. Sometimes they also offer services at an affordable rate or provide added benefits for free, such as a free deployment, unrestricted scalability, or a free vulnerability scan. So, be sure to ask about the value-for-money option available.
Also, when it comes to the most cost-effective option, choosing public cloud is the best bet as it is affordable and also offers enough resources and services to start with.
4. Avoid Over-provisioning Resources
As discussed earlier, the resources and extra space that businesses don’t need are an added baggage to their cost and make a dent in the pocket. Hence, purchase just what is needed and avoid paying for unused capacity. One can also ask their cloud provider if they can let you carry the unused resources/ capacity later in the next paying cycle. With some public cloud hosting providers, such as Ace Cloud Hosting, companies can increase/ decrease their resources and capacity anytime they want. They also have pay for what they use a model where it is possible to customize specific services they want as per unique business needs.
5. Automation is Key
Automate resource allocation and management – use automation to manage resources and minimize wasted time and effort. It is because doing things manually can take up forever, and you eventually end up paying a lot more because of the delay and errors caused by manual processing. So, ask your cloud hosting provider if they would help automate the deployment and other processes to make things easy for you while simultaneously helping you save money.
6. Use Reserved Instances (RI) Wisely
RI can provide significant cost savings. Reserved Instance is a type of billing discount. RI lets the user save on their cloud usage costs. How? When someone buys a Reserved Instance, they can set attributes such as on-demand instances, cloud platform type, tenancy, availability zone etc. Thus, when Reserved Instances are applied to in-use On-Demand Instances, automatically, they can help save up money if the specifications also match. In case there are no running On-Demand Instances matching the specifications of RI, these instances are often used once you launch with the needed specifications.
7. Choosing the Right Service Provider
It is a big one. Businesses need the right cloud hosting provider to save their overall cloud costing. A dependable cloud hosting provider will keep an eye on the business model, vision, requirements, and budget. According to their research, they assist in unlocking the cost benefits of public cloud computing and provide businesses with the appropriate computing services based on their business requirements.
Companies looking for the best cloud hosting provider should look for AI-driven tools, extensive industry experience, and customer support available round-the-clock. Ace Cloud Hosting is one such public cloud hosting service provider with a budget-friendly pricing model where you can start with basics and pay only for those resources you need or use. With ACH, businesses can scale to better capacity, apps, and bandwidth.
In a nutshell, businesses can only get the most out of cloud computing when it comes to cost and benefits if they pay attention to all of the factors mentioned above and choose the right cloud hosting provider.
