A decision guide for the person who has to sign the purchase request. It includes a cost worksheet you can fill in with your own quotations, a room-by-room list of what moves and what stays, and a plain statement of what Skyline does not sell.
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Skyline runs in a Riyadh cloud region. We do not sell colocation, and we say when you need it.
August in Riyadh. The split unit in the small room behind reception fails on a Friday. By Saturday morning the server has shut itself down to protect its disks, the accounting system is unreachable, and the only person who knows the administrator password is on leave in Abha. On Sunday the unit is repaired, the server restarts, and everyone agrees that something must be done.
What happens next is usually a quotation for a new server, a bigger UPS and a second air-conditioner. It is worth pausing before signing it, because the quotation answers "how do we keep a server room running?" when the real question is "do we still need a server room?"
There are three honest answers, and each one is right for somebody.
| Refresh the server room | Colocate your hardware | Move to an in-Kingdom cloud | |
|---|---|---|---|
| You buy | Servers, UPS, cooling, rack, licences | Servers and licences; you rent space, power and connectivity | Nothing. You pay a monthly fee for capacity |
| Who fixes a failed disk at 2 a.m. | You, or your IT contractor | You, after travelling to the facility, or paid remote hands | Not your problem; the platform is the provider's job |
| Growing | Buy more hardware | Buy more hardware, rent more space | Resize from a console |
| Suits | Sites that must work with no internet; very large local files; equipment tied to machinery | Organisations that must own the hardware, or need specialised appliances, at a scale that justifies it | Business applications, ERP, websites, email and backup for small and mid-sized companies |
| Does Skyline sell it? | No | No | Yes |
We are obviously not neutral about the third column, so the rest of this page tries to earn the recommendation rather than assert it.
Comparing a server quotation with a cloud price is misleading, because the server is the smallest part of what a server room costs. Use your own quotations for the left-hand side; we will not guess at them. The right-hand side uses Skyline's published prices for a typical small-company setup: one application server, one terabyte of off-site backup and twelve mailboxes.
| On-premises line item (fill in your quotations) | 36 months |
|---|---|
| Server hardware with three-year warranty | ______ SAR |
| Operating system and virtualisation licences | ______ SAR |
| UPS and battery replacement | ______ SAR |
| Dedicated cooling: purchase, maintenance and electricity through three summers | ______ SAR |
| Backup device, plus someone to take a copy off site | ______ SAR |
| Static IP and a business internet line sized for inbound traffic | ______ SAR |
| IT contractor call-outs for hardware faults | ______ SAR |
| The floor space of the room itself | ______ SAR |
| Skyline line item | Monthly | 36 months |
|---|---|---|
| Riyadh 3 cloud server: 4 vCPU, 16 GB memory, 160 GB disk | 379 SAR | 13,644 SAR |
| Backup, 1 TB reserved | 300 SAR | 10,800 SAR |
| Twelve Pro mailboxes at 23 SAR | 276 SAR | 9,936 SAR |
| Total excluding VAT | 955 SAR | 34,380 SAR |
| Total including 15% VAT | 1,098.25 SAR | 39,537 SAR |
If your filled-in total is lower, keep the server room; that is a legitimate result, and it happens most often when the hardware is already paid for. If it is higher, notice also what kind of money it is: the left-hand side is mostly capital spent on day one, while the right-hand side is a monthly operating cost you can stop. Individual prices are on the Skyline Cloud price list, and the server sizes are described on the Riyadh VPS plans page.
| In the server room today | Where it goes | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| ERP or accounting server on Linux | A Riyadh cloud server | Self-managed: your IT person or contractor still looks after the operating system |
| Windows-only application server | Stays, or goes to a provider with Windows images | Skyline offers Linux images only |
| On-premises mail server | Hosted business mailboxes | Usually the first thing worth moving; mail servers age badly |
| NAS used as "the backup" | Keep the NAS; add off-site backup stored in the Kingdom | A backup in the same room as the server shares its fate |
| Company website on an office PC | Web hosting from 49 SAR | Removes the need for inbound traffic to the office at all |
| Switches, firewall, Wi-Fi controller, CCTV recorder | Stay | These belong to the building, not to the data centre question |
Some organisations should not take our advice. If you operate hardware security modules, telecom equipment, GPU clusters you own, or you are required by contract to own and physically control the machines, you need a colocation operator or your own facility. If you need multiple availability zones, managed databases or a large platform catalogue, you need a hyperscaler region. And if your regulator names specific certifications for a provider, ask for them in writing before buying from anyone: Skyline is a Saudi company running in Riyadh, billing in riyals with ZATCA e-invoices, and it does not claim certifications on this page.
If what brought you here is a compliance question rather than a hardware one, the more useful page is our guide to what Saudi data residency requires in practice.
No. Skyline does not rent racks, cages or floor space, and does not host customer-owned hardware. It sells virtual servers, web hosting, email and backup that run in a cloud region in Riyadh. If you need to place your own physical equipment, you need a colocation operator, and this page explains when that is the better choice.
No. Skyline runs on capacity in a Riyadh cloud region rather than in a building it owns, so there is no facility tour to offer. What you can inspect is everything you control: the console, the firewall rules, the monitoring charts, the invoices and the location setting of every resource, which is Riyadh.
Not necessarily. Hardware you have already paid for is cheap to keep running until it becomes unreliable or goes out of warranty. The sensible first step is to move the backup off site, because that is the part an ageing server room does worst, and plan the server move for the refresh date.
The network equipment, Wi-Fi, printers, door access and CCTV recorders, and anything that must keep working when the internet link is down, such as a point-of-sale controller or a machine on a factory floor. A small on-site file cache can also make sense for very large design files.
Over an encrypted connection that you control. A common approach is to run a VPN such as WireGuard on the cloud server and allow its port only from the office address in the cloud firewall; web applications are published over HTTPS. Skyline does not sell private circuits or MPLS links.
For web applications, ERP and email the difference is not noticeable on a normal business internet line. For opening very large files directly from a network share, such as multi-gigabyte CAD or video projects, a local server is faster, and that workload is a good candidate to keep on site.
For a small company with one or two servers, plan for a few weeks of elapsed time, most of it spent running old and new side by side rather than doing work. Backup can start on the first day, email usually moves in a week, and the application server moves last, at a weekend.
Open an account, look at the console, and price your own setup against the quotation on your desk. It takes an afternoon, needs no card, and support answers in Arabic or English.
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