Selecting a Cloud Service: 5 Questions to Ask Prospective Providers

Monthly Fees

How will my monthly fees be determined?

Next to performance, cost is usually the other top consideration when looking at cloud providers. While there are many one-off cost models in cloud computing, the three most popular cost models are: consumption, IaaS subscription and SaaS subscription.

• Consumption incurs a cost for usage of cloud resources. Most cloud providers define usage as the resource being powered on and accessible. You are incurring costs for every minute that the resource is powered on, regardless of whether it's actually being utilized by anyone or any application. Due to the nature of this cost model, your cost will be variable unless you have all subscribed resources powered on for the same amount of time for each billing cycle.
• Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) subscriptions incur a set cost that covers all the cloud resources to which you are subscribed. Whether you utilize the cloud resources or not, the cost remains the same. In this fixed-cost model, you are paying for the dedicated availability of resources.
• Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) subscriptions incur a cost based on a metric. Most SaaS subscriptions set the cost at a user count, while others may set the cost based upon a transaction count, or some other controllable metric. This subscription model could be fixed or variable.