The report said that more than a third of organisations surveyed reckoned that their move to the cloud had failed to live up to promises of cost-effectiveness. Over half reported a rise in their cloud bill.

While the survey does seem to paint Civo in a flattering light, some of its figures may be accurate for customers hooked on the hyperscalers’ promises from.

Like-for-like comparisons for a simple three-node cluster with 200 GB of persistent storage and a 5 TB data transfer on Microsoft Azure showed prices going from $1,278.58 in 2022 to $1,458.68 in 2024.

The price for Google increased from $1,107.61 to $1,250.35. According to Civo's figures, the cost at AWS increased from $1,142.46 to $1,234.59.

This means that prices are rising faster than the rate of inflation, and what customers receive for their money remains unchanged.

Ironically the cloud was flogged to companies based on cost control arguments. Generally, this worked until the cost of electricity post-pandemic, coupled with the rising cost of skilled IT staff, put cloud delivery under new cost pressures that had to be passed on, from hyperscalers to platform provider, from platform provider to software provider, and finally from software providers to clients.

An AWS spokesperson said  AWS has reduced prices 134 times since AWS launched in 2006.

"These price reductions have occurred even as AWS has continuously improved reliability, availability, security, and performance. In addition, AWS offers management tools that make it easier for customers to monitor and optimise their cloud costs."

That said, users are unlikely to abandon the cloud, even if their vendors try to raise the price a bit.