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.