Dedicated servers vs cloud for a SaaS with a €20,000 monthly bill

A typical €20,000 bill

The instances are typically running at 15 to 30 percent utilisation. The managed database is sized by the IOPS tier rather than the actual working set. Egress is paid per gigabyte at a rate that has not fallen in a decade.

The same workload on dedicated hardware

Twenty-eight small instances at 25 percent utilisation is about seven instances' worth of compute, which is a fraction of one 48-core server. The database wants memory and NVMe, which a dedicated server has in abundance. The question is not whether it fits, but how much redundancy you want.

Even the resilient layout with a dedicated database server is about 30 percent less than the cloud bill, and it comes with more compute, far more I/O, and an operations team. The minimal layout is a third of the cost and suits teams who accept a short failover window.

What you give up

• Elasticity by the minute. Dedicated servers scale by adding a server in 48 hours, not an instance in 48 seconds. Most SaaS load is predictable enough that this does not matter; bursty batch workloads may want to stay in the cloud.
• Proprietary managed services. If your product is built on a hyperscaler's queue, search or AI service, moving it is a rewrite. Open equivalents exist for almost all of them.
• Multi-region in a click. Infraexa is Germany and Finland. If you need an active region in another continent, you need a different conversation.

How the migration goes

1. Week 1: inventory the services, measure real utilisation, choose the layout. Infraexa delivers the servers and the platform.
2. Week 2: deploy the application to the new cluster from the same repositories; run it against a copy of the database.
3. Week 3: set up database replication from the cloud primary to the new primary; test the failover.
4. Week 4: cut over traffic at a quiet hour with DNS at a low TTL; promote the new database; keep the cloud environment for a week as a fallback.
5. Week 5: decommission, and watch the final cloud invoice arrive.

The honest comparison

Clouds are extraordinary for variable workloads and for breadth of services. For a steady SaaS workload, they are an expensive way to rent a fraction of a server, and the egress and managed-service margins compound. Dedicated hardware with operations included gives most product teams more capacity for less money and fewer things to worry about.