It is really helpful article and helped me to understand the concept.

Useful info from someone else who is dithering between cloud or dedicated hosting!

I just chatted to a friend who was seeking some secure dedicated server to offer online training and certification. Instead of his original plans of dedicated servers hosted and an in-house Dev team, he went to the cloud and hired some developers in the Phillipines and he saved 70% on his projected forcast using the cloud!

I’m going to research some more. Keep up the great articles.

James

Thanks for your great comment. I have production systems in the cloud and I also have dedicated servers.

I wouldn’t advocate anyone jumping into cloud or utility computing unless they truly understand the strengths and weaknesses of dedicated servers vs servers hosted in the cloud.

Most people make the mistake at only looking at what an instance will cost them. They fail to calculate the cost of bandwidth, static IP’s, reserved disk space. That $.20c per hour instance quickly rises to an $.60-$0.70 cents per hour instance.

Thanks again for the great comment.

-Erik

There is a lot of confusion around the cloud with public, private and hybrid flavors and most have seen much success with the likes of salesforce.com and amazon.com etc.

For a business looking for value and reliability, I would personally stay with dedicated servers. I did a quick comparison. I could get a computer in the cloud for around $0.90c per hour. Approx $21 a day. Sounds cheap. Over a month that is $630.

Now, on the flipside for instance, we offer on our virtual server platform a server (1vcpu, 2gb RAM and 40GB disk) for approx $250 per month. For Windows a MS SPLA license adds about $20. Hosted on tier 1 hardware, high available data centre facility, server cluster, SAN, VSS Snapshots, redundant internet etc. etc.

That is a big difference in price. Maybe I am old fashioned but I prefer knowing where my server is housed.

I have concerns about security, accountability, compliance and regulations surrounding server infrastructure such as PCI DSS. How well are these enforced in the cloud? I know some cloud providers state this but what measurement and stop/checks are used? Up time and support contacts is another area to consider.

I think different applications/companies need different platform depending on their specified requirement, where some applications are suited to the cloud some are just more suited to a dedicated server environment.

James Righetti