Member Article

Five reasons SMBs should avoid the cloud

The cloud is huge and getting bigger. For a small business owner reading the tech press and contemplating the best venue for web and app hosting, it might seem like the cloud is the obvious option — the default choice. It’s just so tempting. Easy infrastructure deployments with hassle-free scalability, no upfront payment, and you only pay for what you use.

All of that’s true — at least in theory, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you should jump into the cloud with both feet. Cloud technology has its place, but it usually isn’t the best choice for an SMB website or web app hosting. Here are five reasons you should think twice about using the cloud.

You Need Your Site To Be Constantly Available

The cloud hosting environment is complex. Complexity increases the chance that something will go wrong — it frequently does. Outages in the cloud are more common than many believe. Most of the big cloud customers like Netflix have experienced significant downtime and even data loss because of AWS outages.

You Want To Get The Performance You Pay For

I’ve written about this on several previous occasions — users of the cloud pay a virtualization tax. The virtualization layer that lends the cloud its flexibility and elasticity doesn’t come for free. It soaks up resources. Study after study has shown that the cost/performance ratio of the cloud is significantly worse than dedicated server hosting.

You Don’t Need Elasticity

You aren’t Netflix. You need long term stability and hardware that stays up for months and years. For most SMBs, reliability and stability is far more important than the ability to spin up and down hundreds of servers at short notice — that’s just not something businesses need to do.

It Makes Sense To Lease Servers Over The Long Term

You can “lease” a cloud server for half an hour if you want to, but why would you want to? It might be useful for experimentation, but for web or app hosting it isn’t. Predictability helps web hosting companies offer lower prices than cloud providers — you can do the same with reserved instances on cloud platforms, but that removes much of the advantage without solving the underlying performance issues. If you need servers over an extended period of time, it makes sense to take advantage of the efficiency traditional hosting companies can offer.

You Need Support

Cloud platforms are notoriously bad at support. They throw you in at the deep end, putting the tools in your hands and expecting you to make the most of them. Unless you represent a huge corporation spending millions on cloud resources, you’re going to be a long way down the list for a personal response.

Support is the bread and butter of traditional web hosting companies. It’s how they differentiate their services. Clients are won and lost on the strength of that support, so it matters to web hosting companies that clients feel they can rely on the company’s support teams.

While the cloud is a powerful solution to some problems, for most small and medium businesses, it’s a solution to problems they don’t have, and it doesn’t solve the ones they do.

About Graeme Caldwell—Graeme works as an inbound marketer for InterWorx, a revolutionary web hosting control panel for hosts who need scalability and reliability. Follow InterWorx on Twitter at @interworx, Like them on Facebook and check out their blog, http://www.interworx.com/community.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Graeme Caldwell .