Taking the servers in-house looks cheaper on the day the contract is signed. You think you have saved money. The bill arrives later — not as an invoice, but as a configurator that is slow, fragile and never quite finished, and as an IT cost nobody planned for.
The day the contract is signed
The failure mode is specific. Once the system is live and slower than expected, somebody has to approve more hardware, and that approval competes with everything else in the IT budget. Often it never happens. The cost does not rise — the system simply stays slow, permanently, and everyone adapts to it.
So ask the supplier what the system actually needs to run well: memory, database sizing, how it behaves on the hardware you intend to give it, and at what point that has to grow.
What one stored configuration weighs
Every quotation you issue needs to be retrievable years later — that part is not negotiable. The question almost nobody asks is how much each one costs to keep. A configuration that carries a geometry model, generated images and an embedded document is orders of magnitude larger than one that carries a set of values:
Example values. Multiply by every quotation, every revision, every year — and by every backup copy.
It stays invisible for a long time and surfaces years later as storage nobody budgeted for and backups that no longer finish overnight. A supplier who has thought about it answers in numbers: what is stored once and referenced, what is regenerated on demand, and how geometry and images are compressed.
High availability means two of everything
Ask about redundancy, failover and the actual recovery time — not the backup policy. A daily backup means a bad day costs you a day of work.
If you host it yourself, high availability means at least two of everything — servers, storage, network, power — and people who can respond at any hour. In practice you end up buying hardware that is either too small or, worse, sized far beyond anything the system will ever need, and the investment is enormous for a setup that spends most of its life waiting.
Building genuinely highly available hosting in-house is like building your own aircraft to fly to a customer meeting: possible in principle, and not something anyone who does it for a living would recommend.
Monitoring only counts if someone can fix it
If the first indication of a fault is a sales person reporting it, the system is not monitored. But monitoring is only worth something if the person watching can actually fix what they see. An employee who watches a single system without the access or the knowledge to intervene is a cost without a remedy — the alert arrives on time, and the fix still has to wait for someone else.
In-house versus all included
Side by side, the difference is less about technology than about who carries the risk:
| In-house | We run what we build | |
|---|---|---|
| Hardware | Bought once, sized on a guess — too small or far too large | Sized to actual load and adjusted as it changes |
| Redundancy | Two of everything: servers, storage, network, power | Included — failover tested, recovery time stated |
| Backups | A nightly backup; a bad day costs a day of work | Continuous, restorable per series |
| Monitoring | Someone watches — but often cannot fix | The people who built it watch it, around the clock |
| Staging and patches | Three systems to patch; staging is the first to be cut | Development, staging and production, kept current |
| Scaling | Waits for a hardware approval | When demand grows, not when budget allows |
None of this is exotic. It is simply what running a business-critical system properly takes — and it is far cheaper to buy as a service than to build as a department.
What to ask before you buy
- Who provides the infrastructure — and who carries it when it turns out to be too small?
- What does one stored configuration weigh, and what is the projected growth over three years?
- What is the actual recovery time when a server fails?
- Who is alerted when something breaks, and can that person fix it — outside office hours too?
- What would high availability cost us in-house, honestly calculated?
These are questions 14, 15, 16 and 18 of our buyer’s checklist for product configurators. Why staging belongs in the picture is covered in Change, Test, Quote — in Minutes.