Describe the workload, not the brand
Monthly visits hide burst rate, cacheability, database writes, background jobs, upload size, and regional demand. Measure the work that reaches the origin and the time-sensitive jobs that continue after an HTTP response.
Separate static delivery, application execution, data services, and durable storage. They may scale and fail differently even when a provider sells them as one plan.
- Peak requests per second
- 95th percentile response time
- Database read and write rate
- Storage and transfer growth
Price recovery and labor
Include backups, restore time, logs, database service, transfer, support, and expected overage. A low headline price can be expensive when every patch, alert, and failed restore becomes operator work.
Choose the simplest plan that meets the recovery point and recovery time objectives. Preserve an export path for data and configuration before relying on provider-specific features.
Load a representative copy, restore its latest backup into a blank environment, and calculate a peak-month bill using measured transfer and storage.