Every press release on the hosting news site recently is grid this and cloud that. Yes these new technologies have taken us all by storm. I use the word storm for multiple reasons which I will allude to shortly. A grid, cloud or cluster is basically a large collections of computers that spread resources across several servers. The advantage to this idea is you can add another server to the cloud and it will help improve all the sites. The cloud is definably a possible future solution to web hosting for most sites.
Most cloud hosting companies would have you believe that everything is soft and fluffy and for the most part they are. When you look over a long period of time though things are not so calm within the cloud. Here is the issues with clouds as I see them…
- The clouds are still in beta with most companies. The technology works well with 1 site but as a shared solution with 100,000′s of sites it is not perfected. You are paying both money and your sites up time to use a beta service which they market as a high up time product.
- When something goes wrong on the cloud it goes horribly wrong. Also what these companies won’t tell you is that these clouds are installed by 3rd party companies. They bring in a team of highly skilled experts to install and set it up. The problem is those experts are not in great abundance and the host you pay does not have one on staff.
- When a cloud goes down you have 100,000′s of customers needing support. How long do you think it would take to reply to those tickets? I am willing to bet a while.
- Sites that require a dedicated server seek out a possible cheaper cloud solution. Your fellow customers will be sucking the resources from those servers hard. For the price you pay for a cloud you can get your own managed dedicated server.
I am sure that one day clouds will be the standard in the hosting industry for shared hosting. Today they are not and I would not recommend it to anyone that is running a production site.
Note: we do provide a clustered managed server solution for customers with 1 site. These systems run a near 100% up time and can handle insane amounts of traffic.
Update: An example of what happens when a cloud dies. You will see it takes a long time to restore it and that it’s not the first time it happened.
Mar
April 2, 2009 10:17 pm
Dropping by via NetChick!
Idealo Voucher Codes
April 6, 2009 2:37 am
Whilst I agree that cloud computing has the potential to be disasterous, it also has another benefit that you dont seem to have touched on. Disaster Recovery. You could potentially use the cloud model as a cheap way of having a backup of your website or important systems. This would be much cheaper than using third party diaster recovery hosting solutions but would provide the resilience needed by the organisation.