The premise of the cloud is actually a good idea: if you only use the server for 1cpu-hours per day, you should only pay that, and let others use it for the oth

The premise of the cloud is actually a good idea: if you only use the server for 1cpu-hours per day, you should only pay that, and let others use it for the other 23cpu-hours in the day. The executions we've had so far are terrible. There's huge markup, piles of complex abstractions, and all the other issues mentioned in this article. When I was a teen, I used to pay this guy in town like $1.5 a month for a user on a *nix machine where I could run scripts and run my own IRC bouncer and stuff. A bunch of people shared this machine (mostly running IRC bouncers, AFAIK). I've no idea now many, it was stable, and nobody was eating up all the CPU. It worked. I feel that this nostalgic memory of the past is closer to a utopic "cloud" than anything any modern provider is offering.