cloud servers?

Just wondering if anyone has oppinions on cloud hosting?

Is there a substantial difference in performance between cloud and dedicated?

At the moment I am on dedicated, but if cloud is a viable option it would save a lot of finance on servers that I could use elsewhere within my business.

Any thoughts will be appreciated.

Nathan : )

Am also interested in this. 

Was looking at a service the other day, but the system specs seemed to be much lower than normal servers... then to get enough of them linked together you had to pay more than you would for a good spec dedicated server!

Not sure yet where the best offers are with cloud hosting..

A Cloud Server is a process that runs on what’s called a hypervisor.  This hypervisor software lets a single computer appear like it is a dozen or more computers.  A single Cloud Server is just one of those processes.  It appears to the user like a server, but it isn’t its own collection of hardware.   A dedicated server is its own collection of hardware.  It is a whole computer, complete with all hardware that makes up a computer including a processor, hard drive, RAM and power supply unit.

Cloud Servers can be scaled up and down with minimal fuss, using software only.   You can increase or decrease RAM, Hard Drive space and even CPU power all dynamically using a software interface.  Dedicated Servers require fussing with hardware to scale them up or down.   This being said, Cloud Servers are at the mercy of their hypervisor and the hardware platform they’re running on.   They almost never perform as well as dedicated servers.   They can’t — they’re a process that’s sharing a computer with others, whereas the Dedicated Server is a totally self-contained computer sharing nothing with anyone.

only benefit i think is, on some very unique day maybe you traffic might hike too much in that case some provider will use the extra servers resources to provide your site some extra support from hardware resources. Thats what makes cloud better some times. And very low downtime can be possible if you are with a good hosting provider

Shared hosting can also do this.  If we notice a site has been Slasdotted, we can choose to either keep the site throttled (which saves them from a suspension message) or allocate more RAM and CPU to their account.  But there's no doubt that a clustered server setup is better at this.

I remember when we were messing around with the idea of "Dolphin as a service."  That was "fun."

I've "kicked the tires" on a couple of Cloud Service providers (e.g. Amazon) for non-Dolphin sites.  In my opinion the Cloud's primary advantage is it allows a sysadmin to quickly create and change a complex server environment... without having to physically own and maintain the hardware. 

I suspect most "busy" Dolphin sites can get by on a VPS with enough hardware allocated to support busy traffic.  Then as the site grows, move to a larger VPS package... until a dedicated server makes economical sense.  But that's just my opinion... based on limited Dolphin experience. 

I suspect that someone like mscott can provide a 'good' opinion on Cloud vs Virtual Private vs Dedicated servers... for Dolphin sites.

I would not want to be caught in a position similar to those who had no access to their data after the federal govt. forced Megaupload to shut down their servers.

It's a slim risk, but very real risk.

You can find out more here.

i switched to a cloud server 2 months ago almost, and I LOVE IT!

That can happen to any service.  People should always have remote backups (and by that, I do mean local!).

 DRautenbach, greetings. We (HFW) have some real experience running dolphin on clouds and pretty much successful.  One of the boonex community members running dolphin on cloud - you can try it out: http://www.thegettogether.net/ 

As far dedicated vs cloud, please keep in mind, that there is nothing quicker yet that DAS (directly attached storage). Top IO performance of the cloud server will be lower then dedicated server with good storage setup. That will be noticeable for a busy, IO intensive websites driven by php/MYSQL. 

Anyway, if you are running entry level dedicated servers like celeron, corei3, core2duo, core2quad with standard single HDD - cloud server will not be any slower. 

But if you If you are running dual xeon on RAID10 or just SAS 15K RPM drives, that setup will be able to handle higher IO loads then any cloud.

 I am with HFW att he moment on a dedicated..... and I have had problems. Ok,, so you guys sorted them, but at the time loosing my site, the site running slowly and also being hacked were not good situations.  I do like the idea of a cloud being scaleable though.... My only concern is reliabillity... The cost I am paying for dedicated is very high when compared ro recent postings on here.... I will look into your cloud and see.

well your site got hacked maybe because of some loophole left by your developer or someone else 

Anybody else got a hacked site with hfw?

It got hacked because HFW didnt put the security in place that they said they would. There were lots of holes and it was easy for someone to get in.... Consequently, I got a months free hosting... but it shouldnt happen in the first place.....

i do know dolphin itself it at times loaded with "holes" which is why 90 percent of the "updates" are really "security patches" .. it seems that dolphin is in a never evening war with hackers and fighting people trying to find away in. but i will say they do seem able to listen and provide a fix when such things are discovered.

 far as "dedicated is very high when compared to recent postings on here" i too was taken back when i seen so of the prices that was listen here for dedicated severs.. then i got to thinking to myself, are these servers in a real data center? .. are these real "servers" ? or are they just some machines thrown together in some guys garage with parts the picked up from here and there?.. last thing i want is to spend 40 bucks a month and have big savings on a "dedicated server, only to one day have the guys power go out and my site down till his lights get turned back on, or even worse have a hardware failure and have to wait for a repair cause the spare parts need to fix the server are not on hand and we have to wait for the guy to order the parts needed off of ebay.

i have researched prices for a while, and 10 years ago i was working tier 3 support with ev1servers before they sold out, and one thing i learned in all that time was is one thing is true when it comes to servers.. "you get what you pay for". so i think i will stick with a well known established hosting company, instead of trying to save a few bucks and going with a unknown cause it seemed like a "really good deal".

 Seriously, do you think spamming every conversation with the same message is actually going to pay off for you ??

I'm on a VPS cloud, the mynewbeetle.net 7.1 demo is running on a myhosting.com cloud.

Couldn't ask for better service!

The same message uploaded 16 times within 5 minutes... I'd say that's extreme spam and all instances should be removed.