Is Public Cloud Egress Cost Driving Businesses Back to Dedicated Hardware?

Hi all,

Over the past few years, there’s been a noticeable trend of companies moving certain workloads back from multi-tenant public clouds to bare-metal dedicated servers or hybrid setups.

The main drivers seem to be:

• Unpredictable Data Egress Fees: Public cloud providers charging steep rates for outbound bandwidth.
  
  
• Predictable Monthly OpEx: Fixed monthly hardware costs versus fluctuating usage-based bills.
  
  
• Performance Overhead: Needing pure disk I/O (NVMe) without shared hypervisor limits.
  

Are any of you currently re-evaluating your cloud stack or shifting to dedicated infrastructure? What factors are driving your decision?

 

Egress is usually the first reason, and it is easy to check before moving anything: multiply your monthly outbound traffic in GB by the cloud's per-GB price and compare it with a flat monthly server. For steady, bandwidth-heavy workloads (video, downloads, backups) the fixed price often wins quickly. If you go to a VPS or dedicated server, ask what "unmetered" really means: the real port speed, whether it is shared, and the fair-use limit, in writing. For disk performance, ask whether the CPU is dedicated and test the NVMe with fio at different hours. A hybrid setup works well: keep burst and auto-scaling workloads in the cloud and move the steady traffic to fixed-price servers. Remember you also lose managed services such as snapshots, load balancers and managed databases, so plan backups and monitoring yourself.

 

Thank you for advice. Especially on checking port speeds and fair-use limits in writing.
The hybrid model definitely makes the most sense—keeping bursty workloads in the cloud while moving predictable, high-bandwidth traffic to dedicated servers saves a lot of money without losing flexibility.

 

Exactly! For most normal projects, a simple dedicated server is way better and cheaper than dealing with big, complicated cloud platforms.