Algeria AgencyIT & infrastructure
Cloud hosting: what costs is not the storage
The line everybody compares is the cheapest on the invoice. The other three get paid on the day you need them most.
The article on infrastructure asked the deciding question — how many days to leave, and whose agreement is needed — and it holds for this page as for the two others beneath it. We are not reopening it.
What it could not say at its level is the unit hosting is billed in. That is not an accounting question: it is what explains why two offers at the same listed price produce two different invoices six months later.
The line everybody compares is volume stored, and it is the cheapest of the four. The other three — what goes out, what gets requested, and how many people — are not on the pricing page you were shown.
This article covers those four units, the layer you reach them through from an Algerian office, and what happens when the service is paid for with somebody else’s card.
A purchase that becomes a rent
Renting hosting turns a one-off expense into a permanent one, and it is the one thing everybody understands correctly from day one. What follows is less obvious.
A purchase depreciates and eventually costs nothing. A rent follows your activity instead: it rises when you grow, it rises as your data accumulates, and it has no end. That is not a defect, it is the nature of the contract.
The practical consequence is a change in who decides. A purchased machine is ruled on once by the director; a monthly subscription is ruled on every month by nobody, because no monthly amount is ever large enough to trigger a decision.
That is how the invoices we find in audits are built: nine active services, two nobody can say the purpose of any more, and one billing a test environment set up three years ago for a week.
The countermeasure costs nothing and it is administrative: an annual read-through of the subscription list, with a name against each and the question "what happens if we stop it tomorrow". Two lines vanish every time.
Storage is the cheapest line
Every comparison starts from the price of volume stored, because it is the only figure suppliers display the same way. It is also the one that weighs least on a small company’s real invoice.
The reason is arithmetic: the data of a twenty-person business is counted in tens of gigabytes, not terabytes. Raw storage has become cheap enough that this line stabilises quickly and stops being the subject.
Three other units decide the amount, and none is put forward. The volume leaving the service. The number of operations requested — every read, every write, every call. And the number of people holding an account, which is often the dominant line.
The last is the worst anticipated because it is quiet: a company going from twelve to eighteen employees sees its software invoice rise by half without any technical decision having been taken. The accounts of people who left, meanwhile, often keep being billed.
The check to run once a year fits in a sentence: compare the number of billed accounts with the number of people present. The gap is usually two or three, and it has been paid every month since the first of them left.
What goes out costs, and you take it out on the worst day
The most dangerous line on a hosting invoice is outbound volume. Writing to the supplier is often free; reading back what you wrote, in quantity, is not.
That asymmetry has a consequence the price list does not show: on the day you restore everything, you consume in one go the whole of what you deposited over years. Which means the maximum invoice arrives exactly on the day of the incident.
The same asymmetry is paid a second time on the day of departure. Retrieving ten years of files in order to change supplier produces a final invoice, and its size is a non-trivial share of the migration cost. It is not a penalty, it is a tariff, and the effect is identical.
So what to ask for before signing is not the price per gigabyte stored but two figures: what a full restore costs, and what a full exit costs. A serious supplier works both out in ten minutes; a supplier who refuses to work them out has just answered you.
It is also why we almost always recommend keeping a local copy of whatever is bulky and stable. Not out of distrust of hosting, but because a copy you can read back without paying is a copy you actually read back.
You reach it through the country’s thinnest layer
A hosted service exists for you only through the line linking you to it, and from an office that line is a fixed line. It is obvious, and it nonetheless completely changes the reading of the most-quoted figure in the Algerian market.
The ARPCE observatory records some 59.10 million internet subscriptions for the second quarter of 2025, of which 11.29% are fixed and 88.71% mobile. The usual reading is about the big bar; the one that concerns you here is about the small one.
Everything you host will be reached, from your premises, through the thinnest layer in the country: the one with the fewest subscriptions, therefore the least redundancy, the fewest alternative operators and the least room to manoeuvre on the day it goes down.
The consequence is not to give up on hosting. It is to know that the fragile point is not at the supplier — whose availability is real — but on the last kilometres, which are covered by no contract you have signed.
What that imposes is concrete and gets decided before installation: which functions have to survive on a mobile fallback connection, and which can wait. Section 6 handles that list, and it is the only effective protection against the left-hand bar.
- Fixed subscriptions11.29%
- Mobile subscriptions88.71%
ARPCE, internet market observatory, second quarter 2025
Round-trip time is not throughput
Two businesses on the same connection can have opposite experiences of the same hosted service, and the difference is not throughput. It is round-trip time, and it depends mostly on distance.
Throughput decides how long a large transfer takes; round-trip time decides how comfortable everything else is. Software that queries its database a hundred times to draw one screen adds a hundred round trips, and a tenth of a second each becomes ten seconds of waiting.
That is why a file server hosted far away is almost always a bad idea, while mail hosted in the same place is perfectly comfortable. They are not the same use: one is waiting for an answer, the other is not.
The rule that follows is the only thing to keep from this section: what is chatty stays near the people using it, what is patient can be far. The till software and production file sharing are chatty; backup and mail are patient.
And the check is free: ask for trial access, put one person on it for a whole day, at peak hours, on the screen they use most. A thirty-minute demonstration run by the seller measures nothing that matters.
Paying a foreign service from here
Payment is not an administrative detail in this country: it is the leading cause of hosting accounts that do not belong to the business using them, and it is an infrastructure problem rather than an accounting one.
The mechanism is mundane. Signing up asks for a card usable internationally, the business has none to hand, somebody puts in their own "for now", and the service ends up in that person’s name. Three years later the owner account is an employee, a cousin, or a supplier.
It is not a question of trust: it is a question of continuity. The day that person leaves, changes bank, or loses access to their recovery mailbox, your data is behind a door you hold neither the key to nor the right to ask for.
The consequences almost always surface at the wrong moment, because an account gets noticed when it has to be changed: a renewal, an increase in capacity, opening a ticket, or retrieving an invoice for the accounts. No support desk talks to somebody who is not the holder.
The rule we apply without exception: the account is created with a company email address, on a domain the company owns, with a recovery method held by management. The payment method can be temporary; the holder cannot.
What has to stay reachable when the line drops
Every hosting decision comes back to a list only you can write: the functions that have to keep existing when the office line stops existing. It is short, and it is almost never written down.
Three entries appear on it in most businesses we see: taking payment, finding a customer’s phone number, and looking up an order in progress. The rest can wait an hour without anybody noticing.
For each, one question: does this function survive on a phone sharing its connection? If yes, hosting is a good choice for it. If not, it needs a local copy, an offline mode, or a notebook — and a notebook is an acceptable answer.
The worst-handled case is taking payment, because it looks local and is not. A till that checks a licence, synchronises stock or asks for an authorisation stops with the line, and nobody has ever tested it on a day of their own choosing.
Test it, on a quiet Tuesday morning, by unplugging deliberately. An hour of testing will tell you what the previous section can only announce, and the list of functions to deal with will write itself during that hour.
The supplier’s backup is not yours
A host backs up its infrastructure. That is true, it is written down, and it does not protect you: its backup exists to bring its service back after a failure on its side, not to hand you a folder somebody deleted at your end on Tuesday.
The distinction is sharp once stated. The supplier answers for the platform’s availability; you answer for the content you put on it, the people you give access to, and the deletions they make. Nearly every contract says so, in a sentence nobody reads.
The practical trap is the recycle bin. Many services keep a deleted item for thirty or ninety days, which resembles a backup and is not one: it is a window, it is short, and it is silent on the day it closes.
The deletion that hurts is not the one anybody notices, anyway. It is an archived folder wiped by mistake in January and looked for in June, and by then every window has closed, at every supplier.
So a copy you hold is needed, on your premises or at a different third party, with an older state kept. The article on backup explains how to build it; this page merely insists that hosting does not replace it and has never claimed to.
Sizing is done backwards
Buying a server forces you to plan three years ahead, because a wrong estimate is paid in replacement. Renting hosting completely inverts that constraint, and almost nobody takes advantage of it.
What we see is a purchasing habit applied to a rent: size it generously "to be safe", pay that margin every month, and never reduce it because nobody watches a line that has not changed.
The correct rule is the opposite: take too small, measure for a month, and increase. A hosted service grows in minutes, which is precisely what you are paying for. Not using it amounts to paying rent for the flexibility of a purchase.
There is an exception to state, or the rule is dishonest: what does not shrink easily is the number of accounts committed annually. An annual commitment signed on an optimistic headcount is paid for twelve months, whatever the reality.
The consequence is a default preference: monthly while usage is unstable, annual once it is and the discount justifies it. The annual discount is real; it simply is not free on the day headcount falls.
The day the invoice doubles with nothing changed
It happens, and the trigger is almost never a price rise. It is a change in your usage that nobody connected to the invoice, because the two are read in different documents.
The causes we meet, in order: a newly configured automatic backup copying everything each night instead of only the changes; a machine whose synchronisation loops on a folder; an integration querying the service continuously instead of once an hour.
A fourth deserves naming separately because it is invisible: a test environment set up for a demonstration and never switched off. It serves nobody, it bothers nobody, and it is billed exactly as though it served somebody.
The only effective protection is a spending alert set at an amount you choose, enabled on the day you sign up. It is free at every serious supplier and almost nobody configures it, because it gets set once and never in a hurry.
An invoice that doubles gets noticed. An invoice rising fifteen per cent a quarter does not get noticed and costs more over two years. So compare this month’s invoice with the same month last year rather than with last month.
What has to go into the contract
Four points, and they fit on one page. The rest of the contract is standard and negotiates badly; those four negotiate very well before signature and not at all afterwards.
First, where the data physically sits and under which jurisdiction. That is not a political question: it is what decides who can lawfully demand it from you, and what procedures you have to follow to retrieve it in a dispute.
Second, the format, delay and cost of a full export, tested before signature as the infrastructure article explains. Third, how long your data stays reachable after the contract ends — thirty days is common, seven days exists.
Fourth, who holds the account and how the holder gets changed. That is section 5’s point, and it is the one people believe can be settled later. It settles in five minutes at opening and over several months afterwards, when it settles at all.
What we refuse is connected: we will not put hosting in place whose owner account is not in the company’s name, even if that delays going live by a week. That week is the cheapest part of the whole contract.
What we do, and what we will refuse to do
What we will refuse: opening a service in our own name or in one of your employees’ names because it is quicker. That convenience produces, three years later, data behind a shut door, and we have opened enough of them to know the price.
We will refuse to host a function you have described to us as critical without first testing with you what happens when the line drops. That test takes an hour and it changes half the decisions.
We will also refuse to present a price comparison containing only the cost of storage. An honest comparison has four lines, two of which the supplier does not publish and has to be asked for.
What we do: the four billing units worked out on your real usage rather than on a rate card; the costed price of a full restore and a full exit obtained in writing before signature; the account in the company’s name with a recovery method you hold; the spending alert configured on day one; and the list of functions that have to survive an outage, tested rather than assumed.
And what you can do this week without us: open the invoice for your hosted services and compare the number of billed accounts with the number of people actually present. Then unplug the office line on a Tuesday morning, for an hour, and note what stops. Those two exercises cost a morning and decide the rest.
Frequently asked questions
Does the cloud cost less than a server?
It costs differently: less up front, more each month, and the invoice follows your growth. The honest comparison covers four units — volume stored, volume sent out, number of operations and number of accounts — not just the first.
Why is the invoice rising when nothing changed?
Almost always because of new usage connected to no decision: a backup copying everything each night, a synchronisation looping, an over-chatty integration, or a test environment never switched off. Configure a spending alert on day one.
Does the supplier back up our data?
It backs up its infrastructure, which is not the same thing. A thirty- or ninety-day recycle bin is a window, not a backup, and it closes silently. You need a copy you hold, with an older state kept.
Should everything be hosted?
No. What is chatty — till software, production file sharing — stays near the people using it; what is patient — mail, backup — can be far away. Distance is paid in round-trip time, not in throughput.
Who should hold the account?
The company, with an email address on a domain it owns and a recovery method held by management. The payment method can be temporary; the holder cannot. An account in an employee’s or a supplier’s name becomes a problem the day they leave.
What does leaving a host cost?
Ask in writing before signing: the price of a full exit and of a full restore. Outbound volume is billed, so the biggest invoice arrives on the day of the incident or the day of departure — the two moments when you negotiate worst.
Where we come in
Put the number of accounts on your invoice beside your headcount. The gap is nearly always there, and it never comes from storage.
- We price on your observed consumption rather than on a published rate card.
- We try leaving before arriving, on a function you choose.
- We show you the bill for departure before the bill for arrival.
If your three critical functions already survive a line outage, migrate nothing: you would be paying for a risk you do not have.
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