mathie's bits

Cloud computing often advertises on the per hour instance cost (like 10 cents per hour). Cheap right? Not necessarily. There are many additional charges (bandwidth, IO, etc. etc.) that can become much much more expensive than the cost of running the instance. Any wise company that want to invest their time in any cloud must crunch the numbers first. SoftLayer at 10 cent/GB is the most reasonable rate so far for quality. Dedicated hosting companies will continue to have their share because they can oversell (to a degree, some aggressively, some conservatively) when pooling together many clients, some uses only 10% of allocated bandwidth, some use 100%. On clouds, it’s on demand. Thus, the best choice is a hybrid approach, use clouds for burst, surge and maintain the core infrastructure on dedicated servers where deals can be found (i.e. good hosting companies that oversell a little and still provide a good quality service). And of course, every medium/large online system should be designed with outage preventions (high availability, redundancy, no single point of failure). This is why many dedicated providers (SoftLayer, ThePlanet, LayeredTech, RackSpace, ServerBeach, etc.) offer their own cloud. Choices are good and the pie is getting bigger.