Cloud Computing Buyer Beware
By David F Carr
Jon West figured he couldn’t lose by going to Rackspace for hosting. “I’d heard all about the ‘fanatical support,’ and blah, blah, blah,” he says. Also, this cloud computing thing seemed to be pretty hot–instant scalability on demand and pay-as-you-go pricing. But for West, at least, the Rackspace Cloud turned out not to be the right choice, and his e-commerce business 3tailer.com lasted less than a month there.
This isn’t a story about Rackspace, which has an excellent reputation as a high-end Internet host. That reputation is built largely on its dedicated server and collocation services, but I also know a pretty sharp Web consultant who swears by the Rackspace Cloud and steers most of his clients to it. But just because a service is right for someone else doesn’t mean it’s right for your business, and these newfangled cloud services may or may not be the best answer for you, either.
3tailer’s misadventure with the Rackspace Cloud was the just the latest chapter in its trial-and-error search for the right hosting environment. This time the problem was a mismatch between 3tailer’s technical requirements and the features of the service.
West says a sales representative made him promises that the cloud service couldn’t deliver. I’m not going to try to sort out whether that’s true or not, but it suggests to me that a “trust but verify” strategy is probably the best one. And although cloud computing holds many attractions, remember that it’s a generic term for a virtualized, metered model for buying Internet computing capacity. The specific implementation of that model varies widely among hosting companies.
Even before venturing into cloud computing, West says he learned a number of lessons about Web hosting the hard way. He started out with an all-contract technology team, trying to bootstrap the business on as little money as possible. Although he had a computer science background, he admits, “I was in way over my head, to be honest with you.”
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Category: Adoption, Cloud Computing News, Resources, Security, Strategy
