Saving Costs

Here in the US business is just trying to get back on their feet after weeks of lockdown, but there’s still the ominous threat of having to go back in the fall. So, whether you need to close down because of the pandemic or, in better times, because you’re a seasonal business, let’s talk about how to reduce IT costs during a significant reduction in your business cycle.

1) Internet Service. Most small and medium business customers will have commercial internet service, which is usually committed to a contract for some length of time, but if you can get a discount by suspending your store or office’s internet for a couple of months, it may be worth your time to call your ISP.

2) Email Accounts. For furloughed employees, some email providers allow you to stop paying for individual employees to have email but maintain their mailboxes until they come back. Of the two major cloud mail providers, Office 365 and Google, the former will allow you to remove a user’s license to use email for a time while maintaining their mailbox, while Google will require you to delete the user and their mailbox to avoid accruing additional charges. Savings here can be anywhere from $5/user to $35/user. If you’re only using these services for email and not any of their other services, consider switching to per-domain email providers like C4.net’s domain hosting service as opposed to services with per-user pricing models.

3) Electricity. We pay about $0.25 per kilowatt-hour for our electricity. A laptop left idle on a desk draws between 7 and 15 watts of power. A desktop PC can pull anywhere from 40 to 250 watts while idle, but most will land around 100W. A monitor that’s not in sleep mode will draw 20 or 30 watts. A printer will draw 30 to 50 watts just idling. If you do out the math (744 hours in a month / 1000 W/KwH * 0.25c/KwH), you get that we’ll pay about 19.2 cents per watt for everything we leave on. A laptop runs $1.34 to $2.88 or so. A desktop anywhere from $7.68 to $48. Each printer or monitor left glowing is about $5-6. If you have dozens of employees, it adds up surprisingly quickly. Taking the time to shut down everything properly. It is easily worth the time to do it.

Keep an eye out on these tips and other cost savings , especially now in a time when every dollar matters. Good luck and stay healthy.