I'm responsible for a relatively large site ( http://www.foreignpolicy.com http://www.foreignpolicy.com ) that was down for 12+ hours over this failure today.

I'm responsible for a relatively large site ( http://www.foreignpolicy.com http://www.foreignpolicy.com ) that was down for 12+ hours over this failure today. One fallacy that I think that many people make in the whole cloud debate is the idea that a given cloud provider is any more or less failure prone than a given dedicated server host. We have assets on Amazon, Slicehost, and Linode. Sometimes these go down, whether it's our fault, software's fault, hardware's fault, or a construction crew hitting a fiber drop, things happen. If you're not backed up in a fully tested way on not just another server or availability zone, but whole different hosting infrastructure (preferably in a different time zone), then you're not really backed up. Being on a host like Amazon, or even a fully managed host like a Cadillac Rackspace plan doesn't remove the need for good BCP. What these cloud services allow you to do in theory is have that backup infrastructure ready to go on relatively short notice _without_ keeping it running all the time. We can't reasonably afford to replicate all of our servers and hot data to Western Region or the Rackspace cloud 24/7. We can, however, afford to set up the infrastructure and spin it up on the fly within an hour with slightly stale data once a month to test it, and when for things break. Requisitioning that kind of hardware and then dumping it for only a few tens of dollars a month is difficult if not impossible on a virtual host. The big question is not 'Is the cloud more reliable?', but 'Do i need what only the cloud can offer?'. If your current infrastructure can handle getting drudged or reddited fine, and you're only on a few servers, you're probably better off just paying to keep a hot spare up at softlayer. On the other hand if you have 1) Occasional traffic bursting that you don't want to pay to handle most days and 2) Can accept a few minutes of downtime, then the solutions offered by cloud hosts blow the competition out of the water. I guess what you're gaining is not the management software, it's the ability to turn off & on quickly when something goes wrong (or, in the case of a redditing, right). Part of figuring out the right hosting solution involves asking the right questions. (..and for reference, we were all ready to go with a backup... and then we learned that our hosting company was storing our nightlies on S3 and couldn't retrieve them, and that our offsite DB solution was having an unrelated issue). Had we run proper tests (I'm brand new to the job), we would've been ready for this one. I also worry big time about DNS and load balancing being a big SPF, but that's a plan for another day.