Optimizing Hosting Costs for eLearning Delivery: Strategies for Budget-Conscious Organizations

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The foundation of the eLearning content delivery is the web, with learning management systems (LMS), learning experience platforms (LXP), and content management system (CMS) websites delivering content to learners. If you manage your organization's web hosting with cloud services in support of eLearning delivery, you know that costs have a way of creeping up on you.  Free tiers and a clean environment will almost always result in reduced costs when initially moving hosting to the cloud, but over time, costs will begin to spiral if not closely monitored and managed.

After five years of using cloud service providers for hosting solutions for our clients, we began to see costs exceeding budgets.  To make cloud-based eLearning delivery more cost effective, we were able to use the following strategies to reduce hosting costs by nearly 40% without decreasing our level of service.

Know your free tiers and understand provider pricing models

Expired or exceeded free service tiers quickly lead to sudden, unexpected cost increases. Understanding the pricing scheme for each type of service you need will allow you to find the best fit for your budget.  Not sure that you're going to get much traffic for your new site?  Consider pay-as-you-go services that charge based on actual usage rather than the more familiar per hour or per month pricing.

Provision what you need, plan your capacity

If you need a server resource to run 24/7, consider reserving capacity in advance. Provider savings plans often reward prepaid or longer-term contracts if you know you will require a minimum amount of compute or storage capacity. Over-provisioned resources will take a toll on your budget.  By optimizing your resources and monitoring capacity needs, you can prevent overspending on unused capacity.

Monitor usage, investigate anomalies, fight the bots

Analyze your resource usage and utilize cost exploration tools to look for anomalies and sudden changes in resource consumption.  Unexpected spikes in traffic may be automated bots crawling your site.  Enough of these bots and you'll notice an increase in resource usage and in your costs.  Block, challenge or throttle bot traffic as necessary.  Don't let uninvited guests spend your budget. 

Terminate unused resources

It's easy to put this off but allowing unused resources to hang around because "it costs pennies" will undoubtedly turn into dollars.  Over the years, those dollars become hundreds.  Look for resources that were once used for sandbox, development and testing but are no longer needed.  Remove them now because the longer they sit, the harder it is to take action on them.

Uncover hidden charges

While cloud provider pricing models are usually quite transparent, a configuration oversight can lead to extra costs that can be difficult to pinpoint.  For example, while moving or reconfiguring resources, you might unknowingly create new cross-zone data transfer charges that are buried deep within the bandwidth usage category.

Balance availability and durability with tolerance

Cloud providers will always recommend resource configurations that maximize up-time/availability and durability of data.  Consider what level of tolerance for downtime your organization and its clients will have in the event of a major cloud provider outage.  If half of the East Coast is down, does your site need to remain available in another region?  Or would single region availability with downtime during a widespread outage be an acceptable tradeoff for tremendous cost savings?  There isn't always a business case for uptime no matter the cost.

Implementing these strategies on your existing cloud hosting infrastructure will take some effort, but with routine attention you can keep your costs from spiraling out of control.  Simply put, don't set and forget your cloud infrastructure if you want to stay within budget.  To manage your costs, periodically audit and update your cloud hosting resources.