Cloud to On-Prem Infrastructure Migration
Slashed Hosting Costs by 80%
A market intelligence and data analytics firm with 850 employees hosted its SaaS platform, serving both B2C and B2B users, entirely on AWS using EC2, RDS, and S3. As cloud costs increased and workloads proved more stable, EXSQ led a transition to on‑prem infrastructure that dramatically reduced expenses while improving performance and control.
Industry
Market Intelligence
Project
Optimized costs and reliability for its SaaS Platform
80%
Reduction in monthly costs
50%
Database query latency reduction
$5.7m
Projected 3-Year Savings
Challenge
As usage grew, so did costs, with monthly cloud spending reaching $200,000 by 2023.
Over-provisioned EC2 instances, rapidly growing storage needs, and high data transfer fees were key drivers. Even with reserved instances, costs rose nearly 20% each year.
Hosting had become one of the company’s largest expenses after payroll, prompting leadership to question whether the cloud’s flexibility still made financial sense.
With most workloads being predictable, they sought a more cost-effective, controlled, and sustainable infrastructure solution.
Approach
EXSQ redefined the client's infrastructure ROI by challenging the ‘cloud-first’ status quo.
A data-driven analysis revealed that 80% of their workloads were over-provisioned in the cloud, paying for scalability that wasn’t needed.
Solutions
Leveraging our elite in-house DevOps talent and Tier 1 colocation partnerships, we architected a high-performance, private-cloud infrastructure.
By investing $550k in NVMe-accelerated infrastructure, storage, and redundancy we swapped unpredictable cloud bills for a fixed, high-performance environment, slashing long-term overhead while supercharging their SaaS platform’s database and API performance. Annual operating costs were slashed from $2.4m to $306k including colocation, system administrators, monitoring, HADR, and a fully redundant configuration.
EXSQ delivered the changes through a phased, stable approach, migrating core databases and APIs first, then applications. This short-term hybrid mode validated performance and provided opportunities for optimizations, while downscaling the most costly pieces first.
Results
The transition had an immediate and lasting financial impact. Monthly hosting costs dropped from $200,000 to $25,500, with projected savings of $5.7 million over three years, an 80% reduction. Performance improved as well, with NVMe storage cutting database latency by 50%.
The company gained greater control, cost predictability, and improved security by moving to a private infrastructure. A fully functional disaster recovery site was also implemented, which had previously been too expensive to maintain in the cloud.
This shift shows that while cloud infrastructure suits startups and variable workloads, it can become inefficient for mature businesses with steady demand. Moving on-prem restored control and turned a major expense into a strategic advantage.
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