Your old server starts acting up, and the question arises: buy a new one for tens of millions, or rent a virtual one for a few hundred thousand a month? The answer depends on four things: what runs on the server, how many people use it, where they are, and what the law says about your data.
Cost comparison over 3 years
Let’s take a typical scenario: a server for 1C with 15 users, plus company files.
| Your own server in the office | Virtual server in a data center | |
|---|---|---|
| Purchase | 35–60M UZS (server, drives, UPS, Windows Server license) | 0 |
| Monthly | electricity, cooling, maintenance — 0.5–1M | rental 1–2M (4 vCPU, 8–16 GB, SSD) + maintenance 0.4M |
| Replacement after 4–5 years | another 35–60M | none |
| Total over 3 years | 55–95M | 50–85M |
In money terms over three years, it’s roughly a wash. The difference is in what that money buys.
What a data center gives you that an office can’t
- Power and cooling. UPS + diesel generator, climate control, two independent power feeds. In the office — a single UPS good for 20 minutes.
- Connectivity. Multiple carriers with automatic failover (BGP). In the office — one provider.
- Hardware isn’t your problem. A drive fails, the provider replaces it, and you never notice. In the office — downtime until you buy a new one.
- Scalability. Need more memory? Added within an hour. In the office — a new server.
- Access from anywhere. Branches, remote staff and an accountant working from home all get the same experience.
- Snapshots. Daily snapshots of the entire machine — roll back to yesterday’s state in minutes.
When your own server is still the better choice
- Large data volumes in the office. Video editing, engineering design, a warehouse with terabytes of data — moving it over the internet is slow.
- Weak internet. If the office connection is unstable, cloud-hosted 1C will lag, and the server isn’t to blame.
- Hardware tied to the server. Industrial controllers, specialized USB dongles, legacy software with no network mode.
- You already have a recent server. There’s no point throwing out hardware bought two years ago — better to virtualize it and add cloud backups.
Data localization
The Law “On Personal Data” requires personal data of Uzbek citizens to be stored on servers within the country. A customer database in your CRM and HR records in 1C are personal data. A foreign VPS for them is a risk during an inspection. That’s why, for most workloads, we host virtual servers in a data center in Tashkent: the law is respected, and access over TASIX is faster and free of traffic charges. We reserve foreign hosting for tasks that genuinely need it.
Hybrid is the most common answer
In practice, the choice is rarely either-or. A typical setup for a company with 20–50 seats: 1C and the CRM on a virtual server in the data center (access from anywhere, snapshots, localization), file storage in the office on a NAS (capacity and speed), and backups to the data center. All under one monitoring system and one contract. We can design the right configuration as part of our Cloud and Virtual Servers service — we cost out both options with three-year figures.