Erik Howard

Should you host your next application in the cloud or should you continue to host your application on dedicated servers?

If you were itching to put your next application in the cloud, you may want to hold off on that move. In some cases it makes sense to start your application in the cloud, but in most cases it doesn’t. In the past, reliability was a big concern with hosting in the cloud. Your instance could disappear at any time without notice. There were no up-time guarantees or solid SLA’s. Most of these concerns are melting away as the cloud computing industry starts to mature.

If looking strictly at price points, cloud computing may seem just a little more cost effective than renting a dedicated server. But it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison. For cloud servers, you are paying for the resources that your virtualized instance uses. With a dedicated server, you pay the same amount regardless how much that server is used.

Don’t fall for the cloud computing marketing hype of “pay for only what you use”. Who in their right mind is only going to let their servers run from 9am to 9pm to save costs? What they really mean is if your application needs to scale, create a few more virtualized instances to handle the load. When the load subsides, you can destroy those instances since you no longer need those resources. If you had experienced high loads with a dedicated server, you would have to quickly have your vendor provision new hardware. That process could take anywhere from 2-24 hours. That doesn’t include the time you would spend getting the server ready for production.

Most virtualized cloud instances are un-managed, meaning it’s your responsibility fore the care and feeding of your instance. Dedicated servers come in managed and un-managed flavors. A managed dedicated server is usually more expensive than an un-managed server. So if your computer administration skills are on the week side, you’d probably want to go with a managed dedicated server. There are a few companies, such as Enki, offer managed cloud computing services.

There are also other companies (Rackspace, GoGrid) that offer a hybrid strategy of dedicated servers combined with a cloud to handle spikes in traffic or temporary large computing projects.

I’ve managed dedicated servers now for many years with many different vendors. Each experience has been different from the next. From 99% reliability to outright fraud. My experiences with cloud computing have been favorable. But don’t expect much hand holding.

As far as cost, again – it depends on the type of application you want to host. If you just want to host a blog, you will probably be better off with getting a virtual private server (VPS) than a dedicated server or putting your application in the cloud.

If you find yourself transcoding thousands of videos, running a social network, need your content distributed globally, hosting a Facebook application, or have some other unpredictable high-volume application, then the cloud is the place for you.

If you know what your bandwidth requirements will be month-to-month and you can plan your growth, then it will probably be more cost effective to stick with dedicated servers.

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