We’ve all heard that cloud computing can be cheaper than paying for your own server. But the dirty little secret is that, because almost everything is priced à la carte, comparison shopping can be akin to prying a final number from your local car dealer.

I found this out recently when I got a monthly bill from Amazon Web Services for $37. My past bills had been only a few pennies a month for some test virtual machines I had placed on their servers; how could I run up $37 worth of services? The culprit ended up being the virtual private network  I had forgotten to turn off when my tests were complete. Oops.

And therein lies the challenge for any IT manager on the hunt for cloud savings: to read the fine print and understand what is billable and when the meter starts — or in my case, stops — running. You can get more in my story that ran on SearchCloudComputing this week here. 

The cloud has become the new computing cluster. A combination of services that were previously only prevalent in customized clustered configurations — including high availability, virtual storage management and near-term server failover — are now available in the virtual world of the cloud.

You can read my article in TechTarget’s SearchCloudComputing this week here.

It’s becoming easier to run an economical and efficient data center by virtualizing your server population and upgrading your server fleet with more energy-efficient hardware. But be sure to keep these strategies in mind.

You can read the entire story in this month’s issue of Baseline here.