URLStart prices are from the October 2026 plan table. Hardware purchase prices are whatever your supplier quotes; the ones below are round illustrations and labelled as such.
A company that needs ten servers' worth of compute can get it three ways. I have priced the same workload each way over three years, then listed the costs that do not show up on any invoice, because those are usually what decides it.
The workload
Ten machines of around 64 GB each: application servers, a couple of databases, a build box. Modest bandwidth. One capable sysadmin on staff. No expectation that the count halves or doubles inside three years.
Renting slices: Cloud VPS
Ten VPS-64 plans at ₹6,239 a month each on annual billing. About ₹62,400 a month, ₹7.5 lakh a year, ₹22.5 lakh over three years before GST. Everything is inside that figure: hardware, replacement, network, DDoS, IPs, power. Resizing is instant, so if the workload shrinks the bill shrinks with it the same month.
The trade: the ten VPS share physical nodes with other tenants. Dedicated vCPU keeps your share, but cache and disk queues are shared. For a latency-sensitive database, the VDS at ₹8,999 a month for 64 GB is the halfway house.
Renting machines: dedicated servers
Ten Astra builds, dual Xeon E5-2680 v4 with 64 GB and 512 GB, at ₹9,999 a month. About ₹1 lakh a month, ₹12 lakh a year, ₹36 lakh over three years, with two months free on annual terms. Whole machines, 28 physical cores each, full IPMI. When a part dies it is our problem; we replace the part or the server.
The trade: a resize is a different server, not a slider. And this is the dearest of the three per month, because you are paying for whole machines and for us to carry the hardware risk.
Owning the machines: colocation
You buy ten servers. A new dual-Xeon box with 64 GB and enterprise SSD might run ₹2.5 to ₹4 lakh depending on spec and vendor; call it ₹30 lakh for ten, paid up front. Refurbished roughly halves that. Then you rent a rack: space, metered power for ten servers, bandwidth, remote hands. We quote those five lines in writing for your actual hardware. For this exercise, assume the rack runs at a meaningful fraction of the dedicated-server bill, since you are paying for the building and the network but not the machines.
Over three years: ₹30 lakh of hardware plus 36 months of rack fees. Whether that beats ₹36 lakh of dedicated servers depends on the rack fee and on what the hardware is worth at the end, which is more than nothing. For most companies with ten servers kept three years, colocation comes out cheapest on the invoice total. Then the next section happens.
The costs that are not on any invoice
Hardware failure. In colocation a dead motherboard is your purchase, your spare, and your downtime while it ships. In a dedicated server it is ours. Either price a spare into the colocation column or accept the risk with open eyes.
Staff time. Colocation needs someone who can specify, buy, rack, cable, update firmware and eventually decommission hardware. If that person exists and has the hours, fine. If their hours are worth more on the product, that is a real cost that never gets written down.
Capacity mistakes. The ten-server estimate will be wrong in one direction. Too high: VPS drops three servers next month, dedicated cancels at term, colocation leaves you owning three idle machines. Too low: VPS resizes today, dedicated ships in hours, colocation waits on a purchase order and a courier.
Capital. ₹30 lakh in servers is ₹30 lakh not in the business, or borrowed at a rate. Add the cost of money to the colocation column.
Audit questions. "Who else is on this hardware?" is answered "nobody" by dedicated and colocation, and "other tenants, with hypervisor isolation" by VPS. Some auditors care.
Three questions that usually settle it
Will the server count move by more than a third in three years? If yes, rent: VPS for flexibility, dedicated for whole machines.
Do you have the capital, a sysadmin with time, and ten or more servers you will keep? If yes, colocation is probably cheapest overall.
Is any part of the workload latency-sensitive enough to need pinned cores? If yes, that part goes on VDS or dedicated whatever you decide for the rest.
Most companies end up with a mix: colocation or dedicated for the stable core, VPS for whatever changes. Since all three sit on the same network here, in Noida or Mumbai, mixing costs nothing extra.
Questions we get asked
Can I move from VPS to dedicated later? Yes, and back. Migration between our products is done by our engineers at no charge.
Can I colocate my own servers and rent dedicated ones beside them? Yes, same cage, same network.
Who fixes hardware in colocation? The part is yours; our remote hands fit it the day it arrives.
Minimum term? VPS is monthly. Dedicated is monthly with discounts for annual. Colocation is quoted with the term stated.
Does the Tier rating change by product? No. In Noida all three sit in the same Tier IV facility with 2N power and cooling; Mumbai has the same product line.
