Cloud Hosting for Small Businesses | 7 Ways Cloud Saves Money

7 Ways Small Businesses Save With Cloud Hosting

Are you a small business considering a move to a cloud based infrastructure? Here are seven reasons that you should and they all revolve around saving money because you are in a place to reap the highest ROI. If you are hesitant to make the jump, understanding the true value of cloud hosting for small businesses may change your mind.

Here are seven cost savings scenarios that apply to startups or small businesses thinking of moving to a cloud hosting infrastructure.

1. No upfront physical hardware to buy and maintain:  Share in the cost of the public cloud provider’s investment into enterprise quality hardware, patch management and life-cycle management.

2. Compliance: SSAE 16, Type II compliance audits cost the same no matter what size of a business you run, thus, making it much more expensive for smaller companies to achieve.  Choosing a cloud provider that already has been reviewed/deemed compliant by this audit helps smaller businesses meet those audit standards more cost efficiently.  The same can be true for other important regulatory standards such as PCI, SOX and HIPAA, as well.

3. Security Policies and Policy Auditing:  Many public IaaS providers do this work for you.  They have the time and resources to have top tier standards for their facilities and procedures, which can greatly benefit their customers.

4. IT Staff that monitors infrastructure 24/7/365:  Many small companies are IT staff stretched.  Taking some of the infrastructure monitoring burdens off their team (or one employee) can do a lot to both employee effectiveness and job satisfaction at a fraction of the cost that it would require to hire more full time staff.

5. Pay only for what you use:  Companies typically buy or rent physical servers that are much larger than necessary, at a much higher cost, so they can accommodate for peaks.  With the cloud you can simply scale up at peak times and scale back down on the fly so that you aren’t paying for more than you need all year long. If you do want to buy your own infrastructure at some point, you’ll have a clear understanding of what your production usage actually looks like so you can make an intelligent purchase.

6. Licensing Costs:  Choosing a IaaS provider that offers a share in their bulk licensing can offer small businesses the benefits of sharing in their fee savings.  You still pay a monthly fee, but it can be much less that what you’d pay upfront to buy your own licensing.

7. Redundancy:  If you are a small business with one Internet connection and no back up power, then moving to a cloud hosting provider could be a great savings when considering downtime, both to power and network.  A good cloud hosting provider will offer multiple ISPs all interconnected so that if one ISP is down, another seamlessly picks up.  The same is true with back up generators, the provider has everything ready to go in the case of an outage.

When it comes right down to it, cloud hosting seems perfect for startups and small businesses.  Gain enterprise class infrastructure and service without the upfront cost of purchasing, developing, or managing.  Contact Green House Data to see how your small business could utilize a cloud infrastructure.