Turn the number of servers or hosting plans you need, an illustrative monthly price range per server and your fixed monthly extras into a low and high monthly cost.
Use this estimator for a first monthly budget before you collect quotes, or to sanity-check a quote you already have. It answers one question: roughly what will my servers cost each month, before tax and exchange-rate effects?
How to fill it in. Count the servers, virtual machines (VMs) or hosting plans you will run all month. Pick a hosting type from the menu or, better, type the low and high monthly price per server from the provider's own price calculator for a Canadian region. Include the attached disk in the per-server price. In the fixed field, add monthly items that do not scale with server count: backup storage, extra public IP addresses, a load balancer, a support plan, a control-panel or operating-system licence.
Formula. Low estimate = servers × low monthly price + fixed extras. High estimate = servers × high monthly price + fixed extras.
Worked example (illustrative). A small firm plans three general-purpose cloud VMs (web, application, database) at an illustrative $60 to $160 each per month on demand, plus $120 a month of fixed extras (snapshots, one load balancer, two static IPs). Low: 3 × $60 + $120 = $300. High: 3 × $160 + $120 = $600 a month, or about $3,600 to $7,200 a year.
Limits. The menu ranges are placeholders to show the arithmetic, not survey data and not any provider's price. The tool leaves out data transfer (egress), which depends on traffic, plus commitment discounts, USD conversion, card FX fees and GST/HST. Add those with the tax, FX and renewal calculator and read egress and data transfer costs.
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