Cloud hosting vs dedicated server hosting in South Africa
South Africans looking for hosting services they can use to develop and release an app, or for their online business, have a range of options from which to choose.
These include cloud and dedicated server hosting services, and while the former is considered more versatile and robust, it can cost customers a lot to meet their requirements.
MyBroadband compared the cheapest dedicated servers from a range of South African providers to cloud hosting services with similar CPU cores and RAM allocations.
Dedicated server providers used for the comparison include Xneelo, Absolute Hosting, Afrihost, and 1-Grid, while the cloud hosting services came from Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle.
We found that dedicated server options are generally cheaper than cloud hosting services with similar CPU cores, with the exception of Oracle’s Compute VM product.
The main benefit cloud hosting promises over traditional services is the ability to scale rapidly, as demand dictates.
However, this generally comes with a cost trade-off.
The cloud virtual machines in this comparison also have significantly less storage than the dedicated servers.
For example, the cheapest cloud hosting product compared (Oracle) has 16GB of RAM and 100GB of storage for R1,017 per month.
The cheapest dedicated server option (Afrihost) features 8GB of RAM and 2TB of storage for R1,020 per month.
While the Afrihost dedicated server option is fractionally more per month than Oracle, it provides the same amount of RAM and twenty times the storage.
Google Cloud is the next cheapest cloud hosting option, featuring four vCPUs, 16GB RAM, and 100GB storage costing R1,852 a month.
The second cheapest dedicated server package comes from Xneelo and includes a 3.2GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon CPU, 16GB of RAM, and 2TB of SSD storage for R1,195 a month.
Microsoft Azure’s cloud hosting service with four vCPUs, 16GB of RAM, and 100GB of storage is the most expensive of the cloud-based options at R2,934 a month.
The most expensive of the dedicated server products compared comes from 1-Grid. It features a 1.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon CPU, 32GB of RAM, and 2TB of HDD storage for R1,649 a month.
The specifications and pricing of several dedicated servers from South African providers and cloud hosting services from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle are summarised in the table below.
| Dedicated server pricing and specs | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Provider | CPU | RAM | Storage | Price (monthly) |
| Dedicated server hosting | ||||
| Afrihost | 3.2GHz Quad-Core Xeon | 8GB | 2TB HDD | R1,020.00 |
| Xneelo | 3.2GHz Quad-Core Xeon | 16GB | 2TB SSD | R1,195.00 |
| Absolute Hosting | 3.1GHz Quad-Core Xeon | 16GB | 512GB SSD | R1,201.75* |
| 1-Grid | 1.8GHz Quad-Core Xeon | 32GB | 2TB HDD | R1,649.00 |
| Cloud hosting | ||||
| Oracle | 4 vCPUs | 16GB | 100GB | R1,017.00 |
| Google Cloud | 4 vCPUs | 16GB | 100GB | R1,852.00 |
| Amazon EC2 | 4 vCPUs | 8GB | 30GB | R2,194.00 |
| Microsoft Azure | 4 vCPUs | 16GB | 100GB | R2,934.00 |
| *Absolute Hosting is currently running a promotion where customers get 40% off for the first month. For the dedicated server listed, customers will pay R721.05 for their first month. | ||||
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