What to save in a crisis: Optimization of hosting costs

In the current economic situation, the leaders of many companies are forced to think not only about how to develop their projects, but also to engage in cost optimization, in order to simply survive the crisis. At the same time, users and customers expect companies to maintain the level of service - this means that businesses need to try to save money, while not reducing the quality of products and services. When it comes to IT infrastructure, this is difficult to do, but in the case of hosting, there are still some options.

Changing the type of hosting

Often, in pursuit of growth, companies start to treat equipment costs a little less carefully, which leads to a situation in which products and services that are not fully utilized are bought. This also applies to hosting - often server capacities are bought “for emergency”, but in reality they are not used even by half of their capabilities.
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Many companies can solve their problems not using dedicated servers, but using virtualization technologies or “clouds”.

See also: Virtualization: history and development trends

When choosing a type of hosting, one should proceed from the amount of resources consumed - very often, a business needs far less than it seems at first glance.

Referral programs

The majority of Russian and foreign hosters have launched special referral programs , the essence of which is that customers can receive funds and discounts for attracting new buyers of hosting services. As a rule, a user can generate a unique link in his or her hosting management dashboard, which will then be shared with other Internet users.



Each person who clicks on such a link will be considered a given client, and the user who brought him will receive a certain percentage of his payments. Using cookies allows hosters to track even those users who, after clicking on a link, close the page and pay for services later.

Participation in the referral program does not require much power - you only need to place a link on the site, but in some cases it can significantly reduce the total cost of hosting.

Transition to domestic solutions

The main news of recent days - the fall of the ruble. Many people have lost significant funds on changing the course - among them are IT companies that have ordered services from foreign contractors.



Graph of the ruble exchange rate against the dollar

The media have already reported that Russian technology companies are planning to reduce the cost of infrastructure development - they can be understood, because most of the equipment can only be bought abroad.

The situation with hosting is different - at present there are enough players in the country that provide services comparable in quality to foreign companies. There is a continuous development of infrastructure and expansion of the list of services (for example, the provision of servers with different operating systems , new management functions and data security control ).

See also: How the hosting provider infrastructure is built

At the same time, the cost of services of foreign hosters increases with the fall of the ruble exchange rate, because they need to pay in dollars or euros. This means that the transition to Russian hosting in a crisis may allow the company to save money without losing the quality of the services received.

With a dollar rate of 59.3 rubles a server with four CPU cores, 4 GB of RAM and 80 GB of disk space (Storage) in DigitalOcean will cost the buyer approximately 1600 rubles more than using the services of a domestic provider (for example, 1cloud):

Provider	Cost in dollars	Cost in rubles
Digitalocean	$ 80	4744 rub.
1Cloud	$ 52.5	3113 rub.

At the same time, the server of a less advanced configuration (4 cores, 8 GB of RAM and 80 GB of disk space) will be more expensive for a foreign hoster (1186 rubles against 948 rubles), but not so noticeable.

Of course, the prices of different foreign players will be different, but the idea is clear that moving to domestic solutions may be justified for large projects that place higher demands on the hardware.

Technological infrastructure is not an area that should be saved in the pursuit of profit growth, but hosting is one of the few aspects on which you can really save without losing quality.