Renting computers instead of owning them

A small online shop buys a server for £3,000. It sits in a cupboard in the office.

It is busy for two weeks before Christmas. For the rest of the year it is mostly idle. The shop paid for all of it, and someone has to fix it when it breaks.

Many companies now rent computers by the hour instead. This lesson shows how that works.

When you own a server, you pay for it before you use it. You wait for it to arrive. You fix it when a disk fails.

When you rent from a cloud provider, the provider owns the machines in its data centres. You ask for a server and it is ready in a minute or two. When you no longer need it, you hand it back and the bill stops.

# Example prices, not a real price list.
buy_price = 3000        # pounds, paid once
rent_per_month = 70     # pounds, for a similar rented server

months = 12
rent_total = rent_per_month * months

print("Owning for", months, "months costs", buy_price, "pounds")
print("Renting for", months, "months costs", rent_total, "pounds")

if rent_total < buy_price:
    print("Renting is cheaper over this time.")
else:
    print("Owning is cheaper over this time.")

# Change months to 48, then press Run. Which is cheaper now?

Cloud servers are usually priced by the hour. Some services are priced by the second, by the gigabyte or by the request.

This is called pay as you go. A server that runs only in office hours costs less than one left on all night. A test server you forget to switch off keeps costing money, every hour.

A provider has data centres in many parts of the world. A group of them in one area is a region, such as London or Frankfurt.

You choose the region when you start a server. Pick one close to your users, so pages load faster. Pick one where the law lets you keep the data. A UK payroll firm often keeps staff data in a UK region.