Yesterday, I heard about a clever implementation of distance learning by some school here. The teachers would daily send assignments via Whatsapp with links to some online knowledge resource, along with some questions. The children are encouraged to go through the resource, answer the questions and get back to the teacher in case of questions. This is quite useful in a bandwidth-starved nation like India, where asking pupils to participate in video calls would tax their parents' resources.
Today, I had to answer some queries regarding cost calculations for hosting of a medical data collection application. I'll copy-paste it below with some modifications.
As you may know, pricing of Azure services and AWS services are given at
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/pricing/
and
https://aws.amazon.com/pricing/
In general, such cloud services are very much more expensive than other hosting services, if the loads are small and predictable. By small load, I would classify even radiosai.org, with 1.5 lakh visitors a month, thousands of concurrent listeners, as "small".
But in the case of wildly fluctuating loads, when you have a load balancing system and multiple servers which need to be brought online and taken offline dynamically, cloud servers then become cost effective. They are also useful for outsourcing many of the management headaches of servers, to have the peace of mind of managed hosting without the possible security issues of shared hosting.
In the case of the medical data collection tool, they recommend Azure/AWS/your own server for security and licensing reasons. As mentioned at their website, only a very basic set of specs is needed for it, which can easily be supplied by even a shared hosting provider offering Rs. 40 per month hosting. The only caveat is that the organisation who has the license should take sole responsibility for the hosting and support of the application as given in the requirements page.
If the organisation hosting the site is a non-profit, it would be possible to get non-profit credits from Microsoft for Azure, and from Amazon for AWS.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/nonprofits/azure
https://aws.amazon.com/government-education/nonprofits/
Azure seems to be offering a larger number of credits - $5000 vs $2000. Also, on the Azure pricing page, they mention that they will price match AWS for cloud infrastructure. So, it might seem that hosting on Azure may be the better option, if you do get non-profit credits.
Since the loads expected on this server would be small - by my definition of small as given above - I would recommend using a VM with a couple of cores and low end specs
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/pricing/details/virtual-machines/linux/
If you don't get non-profit credits, the lowest cost option would be to hire two shared servers from two different reputed providers, ensuring that their services are located in different physical locations (since your services are in India, you could look for Bangalore and Mumbai, for example) and have one of them as hot-spare. If you use cloudflare.com to host your dns, operating a hot spare becomes very easy. Such a hot-spare setup allows you to have the peace of mind that Azure/AWS offers, at 10x lower cost. But your provider(s) need to be reputable in the sense that they should not steal your data, and they need to ensure good security practices.
Even if for security reasons you do not want to go for shared hosting, you could get reputed dedicated servers for half the price of Azure/AWS VMs of similar specs, or host it on your premises if you have redundant internet links to your facility. Only drawback, of course, would be that you would need to manually set up as against the automated Azure setup option offered by your software. And you need to know how to do some server management and maintenance.
In the case of VMs or shared servers or dedicated servers, you can directly calculate the costs by just multiplying the per hour or per month cost by the number of hours/months in a year.
In case you wish to estimate traffic, you will need to know what sort of data is going to be uploaded/ downloaded - whether it would be predominantly just numbers, or whether images/video/audio would be included, and what are the estimated numbers of users. Again, a simple multiplication.
When looking to host something for non-profits, where there is no charge for the services being offered, we can get the best RoI by minimising cost while ensuring that performance doesn't suffer. So, for small operations such as ours, I wouldn't recommend cloud solutions except when free credits are available.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/pricing/
and
https://aws.amazon.com/pricing/
In general, such cloud services are very much more expensive than other hosting services, if the loads are small and predictable. By small load, I would classify even radiosai.org, with 1.5 lakh visitors a month, thousands of concurrent listeners, as "small".
But in the case of wildly fluctuating loads, when you have a load balancing system and multiple servers which need to be brought online and taken offline dynamically, cloud servers then become cost effective. They are also useful for outsourcing many of the management headaches of servers, to have the peace of mind of managed hosting without the possible security issues of shared hosting.
In the case of the medical data collection tool, they recommend Azure/AWS/your own server for security and licensing reasons. As mentioned at their website, only a very basic set of specs is needed for it, which can easily be supplied by even a shared hosting provider offering Rs. 40 per month hosting. The only caveat is that the organisation who has the license should take sole responsibility for the hosting and support of the application as given in the requirements page.
If the organisation hosting the site is a non-profit, it would be possible to get non-profit credits from Microsoft for Azure, and from Amazon for AWS.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/nonprofits/azure
https://aws.amazon.com/government-education/nonprofits/
Azure seems to be offering a larger number of credits - $5000 vs $2000. Also, on the Azure pricing page, they mention that they will price match AWS for cloud infrastructure. So, it might seem that hosting on Azure may be the better option, if you do get non-profit credits.
Since the loads expected on this server would be small - by my definition of small as given above - I would recommend using a VM with a couple of cores and low end specs
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/pricing/details/virtual-machines/linux/
If you don't get non-profit credits, the lowest cost option would be to hire two shared servers from two different reputed providers, ensuring that their services are located in different physical locations (since your services are in India, you could look for Bangalore and Mumbai, for example) and have one of them as hot-spare. If you use cloudflare.com to host your dns, operating a hot spare becomes very easy. Such a hot-spare setup allows you to have the peace of mind that Azure/AWS offers, at 10x lower cost. But your provider(s) need to be reputable in the sense that they should not steal your data, and they need to ensure good security practices.
Even if for security reasons you do not want to go for shared hosting, you could get reputed dedicated servers for half the price of Azure/AWS VMs of similar specs, or host it on your premises if you have redundant internet links to your facility. Only drawback, of course, would be that you would need to manually set up as against the automated Azure setup option offered by your software. And you need to know how to do some server management and maintenance.
In the case of VMs or shared servers or dedicated servers, you can directly calculate the costs by just multiplying the per hour or per month cost by the number of hours/months in a year.
In case you wish to estimate traffic, you will need to know what sort of data is going to be uploaded/ downloaded - whether it would be predominantly just numbers, or whether images/video/audio would be included, and what are the estimated numbers of users. Again, a simple multiplication.
When looking to host something for non-profits, where there is no charge for the services being offered, we can get the best RoI by minimising cost while ensuring that performance doesn't suffer. So, for small operations such as ours, I wouldn't recommend cloud solutions except when free credits are available.
Very informative. Excellent post. Thanks for sharing.
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