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On-premise or cloud server: What is better for your ISP?

Wednesday, September 21, 2022, 14:09

There are many points to consider when choosing whether to host your server on-premise or in the cloud. Each ISP is different with various aspects that will influence what is right for you. We believe our customers must have the choice of where their software solution is hosted – we, therefore, offer our customers the option to either host Splynx on-premise or make use of our industry-leading cloud services.

These are several factors that you should consider when choosing a suitable instance for your business. We’ve gathered some tips to assist you. Let’s have a look at this table.

Factor	On-premise	Cloud instance
Security	Higher risk. Need to have dedicated staff and expertise to maintain.	More secure. SSH access is not provided to anyone, only web access to the Splynx server.
Control	Full control over the database and more flexibility.	No control over the database.
Cost	Large initial financial outlay. On-premise servers are more expensive.	Less capital investment is required. You pay only for what you need as you grow.
Speed / Performance	Faster, as connected locally. Performance depends on the hardware and especially the hard drive. We recommend using SSD/NVMe drives with the following speed: SSD (400-500 MB/s) – minimum requirement NVMe (1500 – 7000 MB/s) – recommended requirement	Good hardware, however, the connection is reliant on internet speed.
Backups	Your instance is backed up every 6 hours to your internal and our encrypted mainframe. For more control, our SSH tool allows you to back up any device and track any changes in configuration.	Your instance is backed up every 6 hours to our encrypted mainframe. Cloud instance is more reliable in terms of data failovers. (Our data center is in Germany)
Expertise	Dedicated staff and security team are responsible for running, supporting & maintaining data all the time.	Not needed. You can focus on core business processes. Suits ISP startups and small ISPs.

In a nutshell

On-premise server – installed locally in-house, it is more flexible, reliable, and secure if you have the expertise, but it is more expensive.
Cloud instance – hosted in a 3rd party datacenter, easier to scale up or downgrade, you can pay as needed.

All cloud servers provided by Splynx are hosted on the DigitalOcean service. Most of their data centers are located in Europe, so for better latency for our African customers, we are now also providing cloud instances hosted on Microsoft Azure.

However, you are free to use any VPS (Virtual Private Server) from any service provider, just make sure it fits our minimum hardware and software requirements:

Hardware