We have a decent-sized server estate: several ProLiants, plus IBM BladeCentre and SANs running a VMWare environment. Due to an imminent premises move, we're not going to have enough space for a server room, so I've been looking at moving everything out to a colo. My boss is more keen on the idea of cloud-hosting everything, which would include a couple of high-traffic websites (about 9m pageviews/month), our Exchange sever (about a million clean emails sent/received monthly), as well as file/print/AD/all the ususal stuff. This doesn;t sound like a good idea to me, but I'm new to the ways of the cloud. Can anyone offer any advice?
Co-location vs. cloud hosting
cloud computingcolocation
Best Answer
There isn't enough detail here. The issues to think about with cloud based hosting are:
privacy/ownership issues - is it OK that someone else has legal ownership of your data? The implication being that currently (just like the phone company or any other service provider) should there be a subpoena issued for that data you have no right to be notified or quash the motion
no performance SLA- While there are SLAs available for availability, I don't know of any cloud providers that provide performance SLAs
Cost - very generally TCO (from cheapest to most expensive) is self owned-self hosted, colocated, VPS, cloud based. There are exceptions to every rule but for an entoer infrastructure, I've yet to see a cost effective cloud
The cloud has 1 real draw, and that's the pay for what you use model coupled with 0 expense deployment/provisioning. For labs, servers that get created and destroyed quickly and often, you can't beat the cloud.