Copyright zdnet
Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. When it comes to cloud services and small businesses, the sky's the limit. That's a good thing because you're able to add what used to be challenging IT services by simply creating a login and sharing your credit card number. But it's also a bad thing because those cloud services multiply, and they're fairly easy to forget. In this article, we're going to do two things. We're going to discuss the five foundational cloud services every small business needs. And then we're going to look at a bunch of cost-saving secrets so your yearly cloud service bill doesn't grow beyond what's reasonable and practical. Read all the way down to the bottom. I have a lightning round of money-saving tips. Tip No. 9 alone could save you thousands of dollars. 1. Email and domain services We all dislike the never-ending stream of email and the hours it takes to manage it. But you really can't be in business and not have an email address. Depending on how you do email, you could wind up needing one to three cloud service providers. Also: Best email hosting services 2025: My top picks for personal and business use First, you need to decide (or may have already decided) if you need a company domain name. If you're going to have a website (and you are, that's No. 2), you'll need a domain anyway. Therefore, you'll need a domain registrar. This is the service that lets you license your domain name. Domain names can cost between $10 and $50 per year if they're available. I know some small businesses that have spent $50,000 to $100,000 to buy specific domain names. Unless you're looking for a tax deduction, don't do this. It's just a string of letters. Be creative, come up with something that works, and keep that extra cash in your pocket. Personally, I use GoDaddy for domain registration. They've been pretty good for all the years I've used them. The domain registrar just assigns you rental rights to your domain name. You still need to route your email in and out of your hosting provider. That service is called DNS hosting, email routing, or email forwarding. It's the service that the registrar points to for incoming email and that attaches your domain name as a valid email address for outgoing mail. I use Google Workspace for this, which costs about $14 per month for my wife's and my corporate email boxes. Also: Where the cloud goes from here: 8 trends to follow and what it could all cost Long, long, long ago, I moved off Outlook and started to use the free-ish Gmail service to manage my email. That service comes with an @gmail.com email account, but it lets you forward and receive mail from your email forwarding or DNS hosting provider. I said Gmail was free-ish because my wife and I each pay about two bucks a month for extended Gmail storage. So, choices. You could simply set up a Gmail account and be done. But @gmail accounts just don't seem as professional as your own hosted domain name. You could also set up Google Workspace for roughly $7 per month per user and use that for both email hosting and routing. The reason I use both is just historical. I never wanted to try to move years of our Gmail records, all our Google Calendar events, and all Google Docs files to Workspace. But I still want to use our corporate domain name for email. If you're just choosing a service now, you won't need that extra layer of routing. 2. Web hosting You need a website. You do. It's fairly easy to set up a website because most of the major hosting providers offer templates that let you choose a look that works for you. Definitely go that way, and avoid hiring a web developer to build out your site. Also: The best web hosting services of 2025: Expert tested and recommended First, it's cheaper. Second, it's good to get to know your site so you can make changes at your own speed rather than rely on web developer availability and incur expensive charges for every change. The exception to this is if you're setting up a complex e-commerce site, but that's a story for a different article. One caution: don't go looking for an AI-powered web hosting provider. I tested the top offerings a few months ago, and I wasn't impressed. Most of them have nice templating tools, but the AI features were lacking just about everywhere you'd need to use them. Also: Looking for an AI-powered website builder? Here's your best option in 2025 Our company uses a high-end hosting provider with a special deal we got years ago. That deal isn't available anymore, and you don't really need it. We have ten sites, including one very active e-commerce site, so it's worth the extra cost and overhead. Often, web hosting providers will also provide email hosting and domain name registration, so you could get it all from one shop and at one price. Keep that in mind if you're spinning up a full selection of services. 3. Cloud storage Cloud storage serves two rather distinct purposes: providing you with central access to your files from anywhere and backing your systems up so they're offsite. Let's talk backup first. Experts recommend something called a 3-2-1 backup strategy. That's three copies of every piece of data, stored on two different types of media, with at least one copy stored offsite. Also: Why you need a data backup plan for your Mac or PC - before disaster strikes I've met a lot of people who claimed they didn't need backup but then came crying when they lost data. I've also had a bunch of instances of data loss due to natural disasters, power failures and subsequent system crashes, and just user operator error (me doing something ill-advised). In each case, I was able to recover my data from backups. Cloud storage also allows you to access your information across machines, sync data between machines, and get to your data when you're far away from your machines. I found this incredibly valuable after my wife and I evacuated Florida to avoid getting hit by Hurricane Irma back in 2017. Also: Google Drive: How cloud storage and deep search saved my day - again and again There are times when it doesn't matter where you are or how good your excuse is -- you need to access certain documents. Fortunately, even though my home servers were down (and part of our roof was missing), I was able to access the documents remotely because they had all been synced up to the cloud. 4. Accounting software The third cloud application (after email and web hosting) we installed as a business was QuickBooks, all the way back in 2005. This was due to a different move when my wife and I left New Jersey and moved to Florida. Even though we were starting a new life together, our business still had to keep providing service to our customers. Also: Xero vs. QuickBooks: Which accounting platform is better? This was back before cloud was a first-choice pick. We had QuickBooks on a shared LAN in our office. But that LAN (and the servers) were going into a moving truck with everything else. I didn't like the idea of adding a new subscription service (oh, how naïve I was back then!), but we needed to keep an eye on accounts while everything was in a moving truck for what turned out to be almost three months (don't get me started on that). Also: Wave vs. QuickBooks: Which accounting platform is right for you? QuickBooks offered a way to move its local desktop/LAN version (now no longer available) to the cloud. We moved it to the cloud and have been paying ever-increasing monthly fees since. Look, cloud-based accounting software is not cheap. It also suffers from fairly severe lock-in. And on those days when the cloud provider changes the UI completely, you can hear the screams from the office down the hall. But it's mission-critical, and there are fewer and fewer locally hosted accounting options -- certainly not ones that can easily be shared with your accountant or business teams. 5. Something that's not AI I'll talk more about AI in the money-saving secrets below, but for now, just know that AI is not a mission-critical cloud app. It can be very helpful. In fact, I showed 21 ways my business benefited from AI. But it's not one of the five key cloud apps you need to run your business. Also: The best video conferencing software: Best solutions for remote work, productivity, and high-quality streams Email, web hosting, storage, and accounting are common for all businesses. No matter what you do, you need those. But the fifth cloud app depends more on your business model. If you're a sales-oriented organization, a CRM might be the best choice. If you're a PR firm, then one of the many social media managers might be the win. If you do mailings, you might want a mail list manager. If you're constantly in video meetings, it might be a video conferencing app like Zoom. Also: Notion app review: Why (and how) I rely on this powerful productivity tool For my business, I'd say it's a toss-up between Help Scout and Notion. Help Scout is a help desk management system. When someone has a problem with one of our software products, Help Scout helps us manage that customer's needs separately from our email, which is always flooded with people wanting me to write about them or put their products in one of my videos. Also: Migrating your help desk data: It's not as impossible as it seems Notion, on the other hand, helps us manage all the projects we're working on, as well as all the details and any status items related to them. When Notion first came out, I was super happy with it for the exact reason many folks were overwhelmed by it: you could customize it. Since then, Notion has spent more time on its AI offering and put in less work on the actual user experience. But moving off Notion would be such a big job that we're somewhat grudgingly living with it. My point for No. 5 here is this: this one is about what you need for your business. Both Help Scout and Notion help handle mission-critical aspects of running our business. What are your mission-critical aspects? How could a cloud application help? The biggest money-saving secret for 2025 Here it is: don't fall for all the AI upsells. Yes, AI has benefits. But AI is enormously expensive for the AI companies to build out and train, and ridiculously easy for other companies to license and incorporate in their products. Also: How to actually use AI in a small business: 10 lessons from the trenches So, while Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic are building incomprehensibly ginormous data centers for training and handling AI queries, all the other companies have found a quick way to add an upsell to their products. What that leads to is price escalation for many of the cloud services folks were happy enough with before the generative AI hype boom. Also: The best AI chatbots of 2025: I tested ChatGPT, Copilot, and others to find the top tools now Don't fall for it. First, there are free versions of the big AI chatbots that, according to my in-depth testing, are quite good. Second, you can pay $20 per month for the upgraded version of Gemini, Copilot, or ChatGPT and accomplish almost as much as all those AI-integrated upsells -- without adding an AI tax to every cloud app you use. More money-saving secrets Let's do this in lightning round mode. I'm going to crank through ten more money-saving secrets as fast as I can. Cancel tools you forgot you're still paying for: Audit your monthly payments and find out what tools you're still paying for. Cancel those you don't use. You'll be shocked.Delete ex-employee accounts immediately after departure: You might want to save their data, but if they're merely a "seat" on a shared corporate account, shut their account down and save the payment.Use free tiers before upgrading anything: Many free tiers work for a long time and provide enough value.Turn off auto-renew for trials you're testing: Related to the previous one, make sure that if you sign up for a free test, you don't automatically get stuck paying the subscription.Cloud services also have Black Friday discounts: Look for them. You could save 25% or more.Use WordPress to avoid design lock-in: Most site hosts offer their own site designer, but they are usually locked to their service. Although painful, you can export a WordPress site and move it to one of thousands of other hosts.Use basic theme templates instead of paid designers: WordPress comes with a set of nice-enough templates that can make your site look good. Otherwise, you can buy a custom theme, almost all of which will cost less than one hour of a designer's time.Skip branded email signatures requiring paid services: For some reason, some people still pay for email signature services. Don't do that. Most email services offer good-enough signature capabilities without any upsell.Set calendar reminders for subscription renewal dates: This is something we do. It's saved us thousands of dollars over the years.Downgrade or think twice about upgrade tiers: Many upgrade tiers offer AI and analytics, which can be fairly expensive and mostly unnecessary. You can save a lot of money simply by using most cloud providers' basic plans. Also: How I saved myself $1,200 a year in cloud storage - in 5 sobering steps Bonus tip: here's one where I saved my company $1,200 a year in cloud storage by rethinking how I used cloud storage. Consider doing the same thing for all your regular expenses. What about you? Running a business in the cloud doesn't have to mean burning through your budget, but everyone's experience is different. Have you found that email, storage, accounting software, or web hosting costs are starting to pile up? Have you tried any strategies to rein in subscription creep or avoid AI upsells? Which cloud services are truly essential for your business, and which ones turned out to be a waste of money? If you've switched providers, self-hosted a service, or found a clever way to cut costs, did it work out or cause more headaches? Let us know in the comments below. Get the morning's top stories in your inbox each day with our Tech Today newsletter. You can follow my day-to-day project updates on social media. Be sure to subscribe to my weekly update newsletter, and follow me on Twitter/X at @DavidGewirtz, on Facebook at Facebook.com/DavidGewirtz, on Instagram at Instagram.com/DavidGewirtz, on Bluesky at @DavidGewirtz.com, and on YouTube at YouTube.com/DavidGewirtzTV.
