Cost management
Practical writing on cloud providers, infrastructure, deployment and cost, from the team behind the BuyCloudExpress catalogue.
How the AWS Free Tier actually works
The AWS Free Tier is three different things wearing one name. Knowing which parts expire, which never do, and which quietly bill you is the difference…
Running Windows workloads on Azure without overpaying
Windows Server and SQL Server licensing is where Azure bills quietly diverge from expectations. Most of the overspend comes from four specific, fixable decisions.
Spot VMs on Google Cloud: when the discount is worth it
Spot instances trade certainty for a large discount. The question is never whether they are cheaper, it is whether your workload can survive being interrupted with…
Sizing a server for a small production workload
Most small production servers are two sizes larger than they need to be, chosen from a guess at peak traffic that never arrived. Here is a…
Why Hetzner is so much cheaper, and what the trade-offs are
Hetzner's prices are not a promotion or a loss leader. They come from a different business model, and understanding it tells you exactly which workloads belong…
Hetzner Cloud or dedicated: which one fits the workload
The choice is not about size. It is about whether your workload needs to change shape quickly, and whether you can use a whole machine.
When fixed instance sizes waste money
Standard cloud instances come in fixed CPU-to-memory ratios. Real workloads rarely match them, and the mismatch is paid for in resources you never use.
How to read a cloud bill
A cloud invoice is organised for accounting, not for understanding. Reading it usefully means regrouping it around three questions rather than scrolling the line items.
Committed use, reserved instances and savings plans compared
Every major cloud sells a discount in exchange for a commitment. The mechanisms differ in what you promise, and promising the wrong thing is how commitments…
The egress fee trap
Data going into a cloud is usually free. Data coming out is not, and for some workloads it quietly becomes the largest line on the bill.
Right-sizing: the cheapest optimisation nobody does
Most cloud estates run at low utilisation because instances were sized from a guess and never revisited. Fixing it requires no architecture change and no new…
Budget alerts that actually catch runaway spend
A single monthly budget alert usually fires days after the damage is done. A layered set of alerts catches the same problem within hours.