Colocation vs the cloud: when owning your servers still wins in South Africa
The cloud isn't always the answer — especially here. After running both for years, here's when colocation still beats a monthly cloud bill for SA businesses.
“Just move it all to the cloud” is the default advice these days. And for a lot of what we do, we agree — Microsoft 365 and Azure are brilliant, and we move clients there constantly.
But we also run our own servers in a datacentre, and offer colocation, precisely because the cloud isn’t always the right answer. Especially in South Africa. Here’s the honest breakdown we give clients weighing it up.
What colocation actually is
Colocation (“colo”) means you own the physical server, but it lives in a professional datacentre instead of a cupboard in your office. You get the datacentre’s power, cooling, connectivity, security and — importantly here — generator backup, while still owning the hardware outright.
Where colocation still wins
- Predictable cost at scale. The cloud is rented — you pay every month, forever, and heavy or steady workloads can get expensive fast. If your usage is large and predictable, owning the hardware and colocating it often works out cheaper over three to five years.
- Load-shedding resilience. This is a very South African point. A serious datacentre has generators and redundant power built for exactly this. Your office might go dark; your colocated server doesn’t blink.
- Data control and sovereignty. For some businesses — legal, financial, medical — knowing exactly where your data physically sits, on hardware you own, matters for compliance and peace of mind.
- Heavy or specialised workloads. Big databases, specific hardware needs, legacy applications that don’t play nicely in the cloud — sometimes owning the box is simply the pragmatic choice.
Where the cloud wins
I’m not here to talk anyone out of the cloud — most of the time it’s the right call:
- Variable or growing demand — you scale up and down instantly, and only pay for what you use.
- Small footprints — no reason to own hardware for a handful of users.
- Anywhere access and built-in resilience — Microsoft 365 and Azure give you global reliability we couldn’t replicate cheaply.
The honest answer: it’s usually both
In practice, the right setup for most of our clients is hybrid — Microsoft 365 for productivity, cloud for the workloads that suit it, and colocated or hosted servers for the things that are cheaper, safer or more practical to own. The skill isn’t picking a side; it’s putting each workload where it actually belongs.
That’s a big part of what we do — and because we run our own datacentre presence and deploy cloud daily, we don’t have a dog in the fight. We’ll tell you honestly which belongs where.
Weighing up cloud, colocation or hosting for your business? Talk to our team — we’ll map out what actually makes sense for your workloads and your budget.
