The decisions that come before choosing a provider

How we compare

Four rules hold these pages together. First, we compare equivalent scope, not the cheapest option against the most expensive one — otherwise the same side always wins, and the comparison says nothing about your actual situation. Second, wherever a decision hangs on money, we calculate the total cost over three years rather than the purchase price alone, because ongoing costs for maintenance, power, downtime and replacement often add up to more over that period than the entry price by itself — a cheap purchase can turn out to be the more expensive choice over three years, and an expensive one the cheaper. One example makes this concrete: for server versus cloud, the three-year figure includes not just hardware and subscription but also power, an uninterruptible power supply, the time spent on updates and the risk of a total failure with no replacement device on hand — items a plain purchase-price comparison usually leaves out. Third, every comparison states explicitly when the other option wins, in its own block of equal size, not in a half-sentence at the end, because a page that only shows its own point of view is no longer a comparison but advertising. Fourth, no third-party prices appear here, because they change and an out-of-date figure about somebody else is worse than none — we point instead to what the vendor itself states publicly. The arithmetic is shown next to every figure, so you can follow it with your own numbers and recalculate it for your own business instead of having to take our word for it.

Why exactly these four

These are the four decisions most often still open before choosing a provider: the first three come up in almost every first conversation, and the fourth — whether an older PC is still worth upgrading — is the one people search for most. They have one thing in common: they cannot be made sensibly without looking at the business in question — how many workstations there are, how much utilisation fluctuates, which software is a hard requirement, and how expensive an outage would genuinely be. That is why each page states the question the decision hangs on, rather than a blanket recommendation that would come out the same for every business. That holds explicitly even when the honest answer is that neither option is worthwhile for you right now and the existing setup will keep working for a good while yet — a comparison that cannot reach that conclusion would not be a decision aid, just a detour back to the same result every time. The four pages also connect with each other: choosing a server on site means backups need to be arranged again anyway, and switching to Google Workspace changes the question of whether an ongoing contract or hourly billing makes more sense. It is worth reading more than one of the four pages even if only one question feels urgent right now. If a comparison you would need is missing, write to us; we add it once the question comes up more often, with the same arithmetic and the same openness as the existing four pages.