Frequently Asked Questions
Everything you need to know about migrating from cloud to bare metal
Cost & Pricing Questions
What does a migration project cost?
It varies widely based on complexity. A straightforward lift-and-shift for a small team might be a few thousand dollars, while a complex migration involving database redesign and application changes is a larger engagement. We start every project with discovery to understand your specific situation and scope accordingly. We offer fixed-fee, success-based, or hybrid pricing models.
What is success-based pricing?
With success-based pricing, we share in a percentage of your verified cost savings. You keep the majority, and we only earn when you actually save money. This aligns our incentives completely. We calculate savings by comparing your pre-migration cloud spend (typically a 3-month average) to your post-migration total infrastructure costs.
How much can we actually save?
Companies like 37signals and Dropbox have publicly shared savings of 40-60% on their infrastructure costs. Industry data suggests the average organization has around 32% cloud waste. The actual savings depend on your current cloud spend, utilization patterns, and workload characteristics. Our free assessment gives you a realistic projection for your specific situation.
What if migration doesn't make sense for us?
We'll tell you. Not every company benefits from migrating off cloud. If your workloads are highly variable, you're genuinely using cloud elasticity, or the complexity outweighs the savings, we'll be upfront about that. Our assessment is free specifically so you can get an honest answer without commitment.
Scalability & Hybrid Questions
Do we have to move everything off cloud?
No. Most projects include hybrid connectivity because some workloads genuinely make sense in the cloud. We set up secure, high-performance links (AWS Direct Connect, Azure ExpressRoute, VPN) between your data center and cloud environments. The goal is putting each workload where it makes the most economic and operational sense.
Can bare metal scale like the cloud?
Differently, but often more cost-effectively. Cloud scaling is instant but expensive. Bare metal scaling requires planning but costs significantly less for consistent workloads. We help you build appropriate capacity headroom and forecast growth. For true burst capacity, hybrid solutions with cloud bursting are an option.
What if we have seasonal traffic spikes?
Several options work well: provisioning for peak loads (still often cheaper than cloud year-round), hybrid cloud bursting for extreme spikes, or CDN/edge services for geographic distribution. During discovery, we analyze your traffic patterns to recommend the right approach.
What about managed services like RDS or Lambda?
Managed services are often where vendor lock-in is strongest. We can help you migrate to open-source equivalents: RDS to PostgreSQL or MySQL with automated backups, Lambda to Kubernetes Jobs or container-based solutions. If a managed service truly makes sense to keep, it can stay in cloud with hybrid connectivity.
Migration Process
How long does a migration take?
A typical migration follows a structured process: discovery and planning (2-4 weeks), infrastructure setup (4-6 weeks), application migration and testing (4-8 weeks), and cutover with optimization (1-2 weeks). The total timeline depends on infrastructure complexity and how many workloads you're moving.
Will there be downtime during migration?
We minimize downtime through parallel deployment. Both environments run simultaneously, with data synchronized in real-time. Traffic shifts gradually through DNS or load balancer updates. The final cutover typically requires only brief, scheduled maintenance windows. If issues arise, rollback is straightforward.
What if something goes wrong?
Your cloud infrastructure remains untouched until you're confident in the new setup. We validate each step before proceeding, and you can revert to cloud at any point during the migration. The parallel deployment approach means there's always a working fallback.
What happens after migration?
Every migration includes 30 days of post-migration support. After that, you can manage the infrastructure yourself (we provide training and documentation) or continue with our managed services for ongoing monitoring, maintenance, and optimization.
Team & Expertise Requirements
Do we need to hire infrastructure experts?
Not necessarily. Your existing team can handle bare metal with proper tooling and documentation. We provide training and runbooks as part of the handover. If you prefer not to manage infrastructure at all, our managed services option handles everything for you on an ongoing basis.
What skills does our team need?
Largely the same skills they use today. We implement familiar tools and deployment patterns. Your developers continue deploying the same way, your ops team uses similar monitoring tools. The underlying infrastructure changes, but the day-to-day workflows can stay familiar.
How much training is required?
Training is included in every migration project. The amount depends on your team's existing knowledge and how much you want to self-manage. We also provide documentation and remain available for questions during the 30-day support period.
What if we just want you to handle everything?
That's what our managed services are for. After migration, we can provide 24/7 monitoring, proactive maintenance, security patching, capacity planning, and incident response. Your team focuses on your product while we handle the infrastructure.
Reliability & Security
Is bare metal as reliable as cloud providers?
When properly designed, yes. You control your own destiny without being affected by regional cloud outages or "noisy neighbor" performance issues. We design redundancy and failover into the architecture. Enterprise-grade hardware is remarkably reliable.
What about disaster recovery?
We implement comprehensive DR strategies including geographically distributed backups and automated failover. A common approach is using cloud as a DR site, giving you the cost benefits of bare metal for production with cloud as a backup option.
What about compliance and security?
Bare metal often provides stronger security and compliance posture. You have complete control over your data, no multi-tenancy risks, and can implement any security measures your industry requires. Many regulated industries prefer dedicated infrastructure for these reasons.
Who handles hardware failures?
With colocation (data center hosting), the facility handles hardware replacement. With managed services from us, we coordinate everything. Modern enterprise hardware is highly reliable, and proper redundancy means individual component failures don't cause outages.
Getting Started
Which workloads are best candidates for migration?
Predictable workloads with consistent resource usage see the biggest savings: databases, web applications, API services, analytics platforms. Even workloads that seem "unpredictable" often have predictable baselines when you look at the data. Our assessment helps identify the best candidates.
What information do you need for the assessment?
Ideally, 3-6 months of cloud billing data and some context about your infrastructure architecture. If you can share read-only access to your cloud account for a deeper analysis, that helps, but it's not required. We'll work with whatever you can provide.
How does the free assessment work?
You share your billing data and some context about your infrastructure. We analyze spending patterns, utilization, and architecture to identify optimization and migration opportunities. You get a clear report with recommendations, then we have a call to discuss. No obligation to proceed.
Do you require long-term contracts?
For migration projects, no. It's a defined scope with a clear end. For ongoing managed services, we typically start with a 3-month commitment to give both sides time to establish the relationship, then move to month-to-month.
Still Have Questions?
We're here to help. Get a free consultation to discuss your specific concerns.