>Not picking on you but do you honestly think someone hosting their own >server will have better uptime than using one of the current top tier cloud >providers?
I do not work much with clouds, but I have had some experiences that makes me wonder about the stability of the current cloud solutions: * I have seen MySQL stuck due to failed I/O several times on Amazon cloud. Never quite like that on a dedicated machine - not so spectacularly where every read() syscall would just sit there indefinitely instead of coming back with some kind of an error. * Netflix outage due to cloud failure made the news recently. I do not recall a major news item that had to do with a regular dedicated server failure. In fact, it was quite exciting - does not happen often. * I ran the Big Cottonwood Canyon Half-Marathon this year. When I got home I went to their website to check the results and got an error several times. Retried several times after giving it some time to auto-heal or have the admin take care of it. Then after some time the site started loading, but was extremely slow. I saw the domain of the backend scripts was rhcloud.com. I realize that a poorly written PHP script combined with a poorly written MySQL query can produce some wonderful results, but you can only botch it so much while fetching only 5K records on modern hardware. I have seen horrendously inefficient code perform just fine even under load on a normal dedicated server. Now the idea of clouds is great. However, I fear that our ability to get excited about them exceeds our ability to implement them properly which is not an easy task. -- Sasha Pachev Fast Running Blog. http://fastrunningblog.com Run. Blog. Improve. Repeat. /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
