The Full Enchilada

These days the web is all abuzz with the new “Cloud Computing” jargon. Seems everyone’s got their head stuck up in the Clouds! And me thinks a Reality Check is in order…

Cloud Computing I claim is pretty useless unless your Cloud technology provider is offering you some kind of heavy-duty worthy CDN close to Limelight and Akamai standards. Otherwise, for the majority of people, resisting the marketing hype may provide more ‘bang’ for the buck.

In a sense, Cloud Computing is quite similar to the lowly Shared Hosting. You might experience a very cheap price entry point if your website does not use a lot of CPU, memory, or bandwidth. But as soon as your site actually has some traffic you will likely find that you’re spending considerably more to stay up in the clouds than you would have if you had purchased basically the same thing but under the “Xen VPS” label. Sure there are other VPS solutions that don’t isolate the virtual machines as much as Xen and VMware virtualzation and the like do (such as Parallels VPS and some others…), but if you purchase a real Virtual machine, either Xen or VMware or Hypre-V you would be getting a good part of what a Cloud usually offers and likely at a better bang for the buck!

In fact, I propose that unless you get some sweet CDN as part of the Cloud package, that you stay away and just get your own Dedicated Server that you can install and run your own little clouds on! You can run your own VMware or Xen setup.

I am an experienced consultant who has dealt with various hosting companies so here’s a secret for you that will save you much money. Whenever you look at a hosting provider, look at their prices for Dedicated Servers and bandwidth. This is the golden key to understand if their other offerings are overpriced or not. If they can not afford to give you a well priced Dedicated Server, you can be SURE you are not getting the most for your buck on any of their other deals, its as simple as that!

Now don’t get me wrong, the packaging of all the available Virtualization technologies into these Cloud or Grid networks is a beneficial thing in many ways if done right. Unfortunately, it’s really only done right at the highest levels, ie its not cheap to have an Akamai quality CDN and several virtual servers on separate dedicated boxes with redundant fiber optic connections etc…so why pay “Cloud Computing” prices for in effect what might be a simple Xen, VMware, or worse (traditional more shared resource VPS), when you can get fully dedicated hardware and build your own little cloud for less.

So if you’re a big company with LOTS of traffic and much $$$, then “Cloud Computing” might be the best for you, just check to see exactly what you’re getting for the money, its sometimes a little harder to predict overall cost.

If you’d like more details, drop me a note/comment.