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Cloud computing is a massive rip off. From my experience with start ups, they were using things like AWS, because otherwise the investors would be reluctant to

Cloud computing is a massive rip off. From my experience with start ups, they were using things like AWS, because otherwise the investors would be reluctant to put their money in. As in they were afraid of dedicated hosting and something that small business wouldn't be able to handle. So for instance company would have their hosting costs upped from £500 a month (dedicated servers) to something like £5000, so that they could "scale up", while their dedicated servers could have easily served almost any traffic thrown at them and be more responsive. They have actually never reached the level of traffic that this old set up wouldn't be able to handle, but investors were always saying "what if we get sudden surge of users" which has never materialised. But then it was their money so nobody objected. I can see that now that hosting costs in the cloud have become ridiculous, cash strapped smaller businesses will be looking for savings and the cloud is quite an obvious area to look for cuts.

unoti 4y ago
> while their dedicated servers could have easily served almost any traffic thrown at them and be more responsive Sounds great, for some use cases. Particularly if you don't need multiple 9's of uptime, and just need a few 8's. Most companies don't have: * Guaranteed sla's for replacing components when the RAM needs to be reseated, a drive fails, or the fans get too dusty and things overheat * Redundancy set up in case the network connection fails * Redundancy set up in case the power fails. (Many places will have a UPS for under an hour, but generators, along with a regular maintenance schedule and processes for ensuring fuel is another thing) * On site security, to make sure nobody breaks in and does some corporate espionage * Ultra-high-speed links to the internet And if the little startup takes on a client with important certification requirements, it can be very helpful to have a cloud provider. A lot of contracts I've taken on over the years ask tough questions during the sales process about our practices regarding the above things and much more.
- genmud 4y ago
  Have you never used colos? They literally tick all the boxes and it would be one of the worst colos I have ever seen to not have 3x9’s.
- varispeed 4y ago
  I have some dedicated servers with over 7 years uptime now. Only time they were unreachable (not down), when datacentre had a network maintenance and that was an extremely rare and short event. The points you have listed are important, but are really non-issue unless you are co-locating servers in the utility room somewhere, rather than in a proper data centre.

unoti 4y ago

> while their dedicated servers could have easily served almost any traffic thrown at them and be more responsive Sounds great, for some use cases. Particularly if you don't need multiple 9's of uptime, and just need a few 8's. Most companies don't have: * Guaranteed sla's for replacing components when the RAM needs to be reseated, a drive fails, or the fans get too dusty and things overheat * Redundancy set up in case the network connection fails * Redundancy set up in case the power fails. (Many places will have a UPS for under an hour, but generators, along with a regular maintenance schedule and processes for ensuring fuel is another thing) * On site security, to make sure nobody breaks in and does some corporate espionage * Ultra-high-speed links to the internet And if the little startup takes on a client with important certification requirements, it can be very helpful to have a cloud provider. A lot of contracts I've taken on over the years ask tough questions during the sales process about our practices regarding the above things and much more.

genmud 4y ago
Have you never used colos? They literally tick all the boxes and it would be one of the worst colos I have ever seen to not have 3x9’s.
varispeed 4y ago
I have some dedicated servers with over 7 years uptime now. Only time they were unreachable (not down), when datacentre had a network maintenance and that was an extremely rare and short event. The points you have listed are important, but are really non-issue unless you are co-locating servers in the utility room somewhere, rather than in a proper data centre.