Beware of the “Cloud”! It may not mean what you think.

From Wikipedia , Cloud computing is described as:

Cloud computing is Internet-based computing, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices on demand, like the electricity grid.

When you are purchasing hosting from a hosting company, beware that the term “Cloud” may be mis-used and may not be what you think it is!

Recently I was tasked to install and setup a new customer site that was touted as utilizing their latest “Cloud” specialization. The customer had a tremendous amount of traffic and was previously hosted on a regular VPS based system that was able to keep up. The “cloud-based” site began experiencing tremendous slow-downs. I was able to trace the main issue to the write speeds of the disk drive which were half as fast as those on the previous VPS hosting package. We were advised to upgrade to their “Enterprise” platform which would have dedicated hardware and better SAN storage drives, which led me to question what the heck we were currently being hosting on.

After a few weeks of their tech support dodging my questions about their disk speeds, an engineer finally explained that our “basic” cloud service was ACTUALLY just a virtual container being hosted locally on a multi-tennant server using VMWare ESXi. Their was no clustering and no full-service fault tolerance. If that server crashed, so did everyone else being hosted on that server. The only difference between this “budget” cloud service and their former VPS service was that this “Cloud” service cost more and had significantly less performance.

While technically it met the “shared resources” on demand aspect of “Cloud Computing”, it certainly did not fit with the common notion that the cloud was reliable and always “on”. For the real version of the cloud, where the server would be hosted in a cluster and automatically fail-over, we would have had to pay four times more a month.

Buyers beware! Make sure that if a hosting company advertises a “Cloud” solution, that it actually is based on a fault-tolerant architecture (VMWare ESX or other Enterprise solutions) and not simply a bunch of virtual servers being run on a single server. Heck, maybe we SHOULD go with that loose term for “Cloud” computing. It would make my marketing sound a lot better! Silva Tech Solutions runs “Cloud” servers on ALL of their workstations!