The Cost of .... Easy
The Hidden Cost of Convenience
The cloud computing revolution promised to simplify IT infrastructure and reduce costs. For many organizations, especially in the early days, this promise held true. But as cloud services have matured and monthly bills have grown, a different reality has emerged: what started as cost savings has become a perpetual expense that grows relentlessly over time.
At Kontango, we've taken a fundamentally different approach. Instead of feeding the monthly subscription beast, we help our clients break free from cloud dependency by maximizing the potential of existing hardware and strategically acquiring used equipment that delivers enterprise-grade performance at a fraction of the cost.
The True Cost of Cloud Computing
To understand why hardware reuse makes financial sense, it's essential to examine the real costs of cloud computing beyond the marketing materials and introductory pricing.
Storage Costs: The Silent Budget Killer
Cloud storage appears affordable when you're dealing with gigabytes, but enterprise needs quickly reach terabyte and petabyte scales where the math becomes sobering.
Amazon S3 Standard Storage costs approximately $23 per terabyte per month. For an organization with 100TB of data—a modest amount for many businesses—that's $2,300 monthly, or $27,600 annually, just for storage. Over five years, that's $138,000 with no hardware to show for it.
Google Cloud Storage charges around $20 per terabyte monthly for standard storage, which works out to $24,000 annually for that same 100TB. The costs multiply quickly when you factor in data transfer fees, API requests, and the inevitability of data growth.
Microsoft Azure pricing follows similar patterns, with additional complexity around different storage tiers and access patterns that can make cost prediction challenging.
Compute Costs: The Monthly Subscription Trap
Cloud compute costs follow a similar pattern of appearing reasonable until you calculate long-term expenses.
A moderate cloud server with 8 CPU cores, 32GB RAM, and adequate storage might cost $400-600 monthly across major providers. Over five years, that's $24,000-36,000 for a single server that you never own.
High-performance instances required for demanding applications can easily cost $1,000-3,000 monthly. A small cluster of these instances can generate cloud bills of $10,000-20,000 monthly—costs that compound relentlessly month after month.
The Bandwidth Tax
Cloud providers charge for data transfer, creating an ongoing tax on your own data. Moving data between services, backing up to different regions, or simply serving content to users generates additional monthly charges that can be difficult to predict and control.
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