Finally got the right call on a cloud vs on-premise decision

Had to choose between running our document processor on AWS servers or buying a $12,000 local server rack. Picked the local route after finding out our internet goes down twice a month on average. Three months in and no regrets, it paid for itself in saved downtime already. Anyone else deal with this kind of infrastructure choice at a small company?

2 comments

2 Comments

davis.ivan1d ago

Are your operations really that critical that two internet outages a month are costing you twelve grand? Seems like a lot of money for a problem a hotspot could have fixed.

davidwright1d ago

Hotspot wouldn't cut it for real-time data processing. @davis.ivan look at it this way - every minute of downtime means we're LOSING data packets that can't be recreated. Those twelve grand includes the overtime for three engineers who have to manually re-sync everything after each outage, plus the penalty clauses in our client contracts. Last month a four hour blackout cost us a custom database rebuild that took 40 man hours to fix. The REAL expense is in the time debt you can never get back.