Companies are moving off the cloud and back onto their own servers. Should you?

Ten years ago the advice was simple: put everything in the cloud. Now a lot of businesses are quietly bringing some of it back, onto servers they own.

I've done a bit of this myself this year. Not all of it, and not for the reasons you might expect. Here's what's going on and how I'd decide.

What's actually happening

The best-known example is 37signals, the company behind Basecamp. In October 2024 its CTO wrote that their cloud bill had dropped from $3.2 million a year to $1.3 million after moving onto about $700,000 of their own hardware. They expect to save well over $10 million over five years, and they say the team running it all is the same size as before.

It isn't just one loud company, either. Barclays asks large-company IT bosses about this every six months. In the second half of 2020, 43% were planning to bring some work back from the public cloud. By early 2024 it was 83%.

The key word there is "some". Hardly anyone is leaving the cloud completely. One analyst told The Register that companies actively doing this are a "single digit percentage" of the market. What most are doing is picking out the pieces that are cheaper or easier to run themselves.

Why it's happening

Three reasons come up again and again.

The bill. Cloud is brilliant when your usage goes up and down. If it's steady, day in, day out, you're paying a premium for flexibility you never use. A server that sits at the same load for five years is often cheaper to own.

Surprises. Data transfer charges, storage you forgot about, snapshots, IP addresses. Cloud bills have a lot of lines, and they grow quietly.

Control. Knowing exactly where your data sits, and not having a price rise or a change of terms land on you with a month's notice.

What I've done

This is the bit where I own up. I've moved several of our office tools onto hardware in the office this year.

Our team chat runs on Mattermost on a box in the office, instead of Slack. Shared files sit in Nextcloud on a second box, which is also a standby copy of the first. Every night the backups go to a separate Dell PowerEdge with mirrored disks, and a copy leaves the building as well. The screen on the wall that watches all our servers runs in the office too.

What I haven't moved is client websites. Those stay in the cloud, and I've no plans to change that. A client's shop needs to stay up when our office broadband doesn't, and a proper data centre does power, cooling and network far better than a cupboard.

So the split is roughly this. Things only we use, which can survive an afternoon offline: in the office. Things customers use: in the cloud.

What nobody mentions

Owning servers swaps one set of jobs for another, and some of them are dull.

You need a UPS, so a power cut doesn't take everything down mid-write. You need a second internet line. We have 4G failover. One catch: it gives you a different IP address, so anything locked down to the office IP stops letting you in. You need to test your backups, not just take them. And when a disk dies at 7am, it's your disk.

There's also a 2026 twist. Memory prices have shot up because AI data centres are buying everything, which is why hosting bills have gone up. The same thing makes new servers dearer to buy. Owning hardware isn't the bargain it was two years ago, though it still wins for steady, predictable work.

How I'd decide

Go through what you run and ask three questions of each thing.

1. Is the load steady? If it barely changes month to month, owning it may well be cheaper. If it spikes, leave it in the cloud.
2. Who needs it when the office is closed? Customers, or staff working from home? Then it either stays in the cloud or needs a proper, tested way in from outside.
3. Who looks after it? If the honest answer is "nobody, really", don't bring it in-house. A neglected server in a cupboard is worse than a cloud server you pay a bit too much for.

Good first candidates are internal tools: chat, file sharing, a wiki, backups, a test server. My Slack alternatives and Dropbox and Google Drive alternatives pages cover the open-source options I'd look at first. If you want to understand the basics yourself, I've written about why learning a bit of Linux is worth it.

The plain answer

For most small businesses, it isn't cloud or office. It's both, with each thing in the place that suits it. Start by working out what you're actually paying for and what each thing needs. That usually makes the answer fairly obvious.

If the servers are running old software that nobody wants to touch, moving it is a bigger job. The team at Dev Partners can look after that side.