How to Reduce Your Cloud Cost?- 7 Best Tips

Controlling cloud costs can be difficult. But using the right strategies can help you reduce cloud costs largely. Organizations that proactively manage their cloud infrastructures receive the most cloud benefits for the cloud cost and assure continued cost-effective cloud operations.

However, when difficult-to-understand cloud provider bills show up, organizations who delve into the public cloud frequently wonder, if they have taken the right step by moving to the cloud in the first place.

If so, there is good news for you. It is very easy to optimize or reduce your cloud cost.

Wondering how?

Cloud cost can be reduced — primarily by detecting inefficient cloud infrastructure provisioning and creating cloud financial management best practices. And the process is called Cloud Cost Optimization. 

Read this post to understand how to reduce cloud costs and reap the benefits of elasticity, reliability, high availability, and agility that the cloud offers.

Top 7 Tips to Reduce Cloud Costs

We understand your agony if you fail to make sense of your cloud bill. But, worry not! Following the below-mentioned tips will help you reduce the cloud cost. 

1. Rightsize Your Compute Resources 

Web service providers offer different plans or instance types based on your needs and capacity. Selecting the right instance size for your organization is the first and foremost step to reducing cloud costs.

You may reduce cloud costs by matching instance types and sizes to your workload performance and capacity requirements. Using this practice, you can even analyze deployed instances to find ways to reduce or eliminate them without compromising capacity or other needs.

However, enterprises typically overlook rightsizing when moving to the Public Cloud for the first time. They raise and resize their habitats subsequently. Speed and performance are frequently prioritized over cost, resulting in larger instances and wasted resource waste.

2. Keep an eye on consumption 

How efficient is your storage? 

Yes, this is critical to understand. Presumably, you don’t want to pay for unused storage, and you should never do that. It raises your cloud cost, which is not wise.

Also, you are not required to pay for a high-cost storage tier for data that could be stored on a lower-cost tier. 

Hence, it is critical to keep a close eye on storage consumption and accordingly choose the right storage. In “colder” storage tiers, costs drop from $.20-$.30/GB to $.02/GB/month.

 3. Use automation techniques

Utilize cloud automation to deploy, configure, and manage your computing services. Automating backup and storage, configurations, code deployment, and settings security and compliance can significantly minimize the amount of manual intervention required. This reduces manual errors and frees up your IT team to work on more strategic business operations.

Dynamic resource allocation can assist in balancing workloads and preventing overconsumption. Automated security scans can detect potential security issues well in advance. Cloud orchestration can be used to arrange resources so that they can be combined into a single automated process. 

4. Organize your cloud computing resources

Just like scheduling your work and workloads is indispensable for the smooth functioning of your business, organizing your cloud computing resources is essential to keep your cloud costs low. 

It’s simple – if the resources are not in use, there is no reason to keep them active and pay for them. You can apply the same technique to projects and deployments. Certain resources may require only a limited amount of time to be active, so organize your resources accordingly.

5. Eliminate obsolete and unused items

Consider your own personal computer’s hard drive. It’s so easy to store things that you’re likely to have a large number of files that you’ll never use again. Your business’s cloud data center is likely to have a similar amount of useless data. Since you are paying for capacity, you should make it a habit to trim or deprecate data as it becomes obsolete.

Additionally, you should look for orphan instances, volumes, or containers that are no longer in use by active projects. Elastic Load Balancers (ELBs) can assist in the distribution of workloads and traffic; however, they are not free.

Delete any instances associated with your ELB. The same is true for disassociated IP addresses and decommissioned machine images.

6. Buy what you need 

Purchasing at the pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) method is quite common among humans. We tend to buy things predicting that we may need them in the future. Sometimes this strategy may work; however, in the case of purchasing cloud services, it doesn’t work at all.

Cloud service providers offer a diverse range of usage-based pricing structures. The compute pricing choices available in public cloud architecture include on-demand, reserved instances, convertible reserved instances, preemptible instances, spot instances, and Savings Plans.

Reserved instances can be up to 75% less expensive than on-demand instances, whereas spot instances can cost you up to 90% less expensive than on-demand instances. 

So, the trick is to invest in such a way that saves you money or costs you less and provides you with all the benefits of the cloud. But, it’s not easy! 

This can be achieved by implementing tools and processes that identify when reserved capacity should be used vs. spot or preemptible instances and continuously balancing and optimizing the price options employed.

7. Get discounts 

Whatever your reason for using public cloud computing, whether you’re just getting started or have received a bill that has blown your budget, it’s a good idea to look for ways to get discounts on cloud computing services. You don’t need to pay the list price when there are options available to you.

You can save money by purchasing compute capacity in advance – famous examples include AWS Reserved Instances, Azure Reserved Instances, and Google Committed Use Discounts.

Another way to save is by increasing your resource utilization. Google Sustained Use Discounts are the primary example. GCP will charge you less than the published price if you use an instance for at least 25% of the month. This is an exciting option for automatic savings. 

Aside from that, there are many other ways you can reduce cloud costs, such as if your business is huge, search for enterprise deals, and volume discounts. If you’re just getting started, seek cloud service providers who offer free credit programs. 

Critical Reasons to Pick Cloud for your Business

Cloud services are preferred worldwide by businesses of all sizes. So if your company is still in the thinking process to choose cloud, you must know that you are already behind 90% of organizations. Using Cloud has become mainstream and all major organizations have shifted their workload to the cloud already. 

But with advantages come the risks in using Cloud. Even though when you look at the benefits of using the cloud, you will understand it will outdo all the risks. 

Here are the top reasons why you must pick cloud for your business:

1. Get a better Insight with Cloud- You cannot deny the fact that we live in a world with a large amount of unstructured data, but with cloud, big data, and analytics, you can easily get structured data, which will help you do your business more effectively and target the right audience. 

2. Increased collaboration- Using the cloud, you can easily access your data and files from any part of the world. It makes it easier for the team to collaborate and work more efficiently. 

3. It leads to improved engagement- Gone are the days when businesses only preferred cost efficiencies in the back-office systems, now they use strategies to improve system engagement as well. Cloud helps you form strong links with your customer. 

4. Powerful speed- More than 52% of leading organizations are using the cloud to help their organizations move towards innovation and introduce new products and services in the market. 

The Bottom Line

So, these are the 7 best ways to reduce your cloud costs. Remember that successful organizations adopt effective practices when functioning in the cloud; make sure you also do the same. Aside from the above-outlined tips, it is essential to choose the right vendor who can help you save the cost on the cloud.

At Go4Hosting, we allocate a specialized technical team of Cloud Advisors. Our team will help you become aware of cloud expenditure and will assist you in creating suitable processes to reel in their cloud overspending.

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