The Cloud vs Self Hosted…The Cloud vs Self Hosted…
Many years ago when I began in the computer industry, everything was self hosted in the office area. Our technology teams (that was me and my buddies initially) would build the box, install the software, configure the software, and manage the software. We were responsible for the network and all.
Security (for that time) was good pretty tight.
Then came “colocation sites”. You rented space in an highly controlled physical environment with AC, Heat, power redundancy, network redundancy, etc. and secured cage access in the price. In most cases, you provided your own equipment in the cage. Here again, YOU are responsible for the online security, data and hardware. YOU controlled everything but the power and outside the cage network. You were given a IP range and went from there. If you had problems “inside the cage”, you had to send someone there to enter the cage, find the problem and fix it, unless it was a software issue you could fix remotely. You paid for the network, power usage, and AC. The size of the cage and amount of hardware you had in the cage set the price of the space.
(This picture works for both colocation businesses and “Cloud” hosts:)
Then the “Cloud” came along. In this setup the data and software runs on someone else’s computer(s). You install your software and/or data remotely, configure it up, and they host it for you controlling the hardware, access to the hardware, power, AC, and security. You have no physical access to your data (including software). If the hardware goes down, provided you don’t have a second site up with the same data outwardly accessible to your clients, or the building burns down, or their system gets hacked or DOS’ed, etc you are down harder than you would be if you self hosted it or colocated it but owned the hardware in the cage.
Your up front cost for self hosted or colocation hosting of your hardware, and your ongoing maintenance cost of same can be higher but YOU own the data access 100%. If you colocate, you do need to have a second site that is synced with your primary site for roll over and fall back. It can be the same hosting company or a different one.
If you are “cloud hosting” you have NO control as far as I am concerned. Now, if the company is good, the employees of that company are good, you have a chance, but for the most part, every system I have looked out that host your data “on the cloud”, I don’t see the security I want there, and they have WAY to much access to your data in WAY too many ways. Add to that, if their location goes down, YOU go down, and you don’t have access to your data for hours, days, weeks. Just look at what recently happened with the Azure and Amazon clouds over a bad install of some software to the host systems!
Yes, you can have a mass outage on your self hosted location, or even your colocated location (that you have quick access to normally, and you probably have a backup system at “home” or secondary hosting in place to fall back to, most cloud systems do not have that back up from what I have seen), but you have direct access to the servers, can do what needs to be done yourself and do not need outsiders trying to fix your data for you or give you your data back…
I have been against the “Cloud Data” and “Cloud Application/Program” hosting since they started. I want my data in front of me, and I want my program on my computer where I can work without the network as I want. Especially in word processing, writing programs, video editing, and such.
My websites are colocated, although I don’t have direct access to the hardware, I have pretty good access to the programs behind the scene, I install the software, configure the software, etc. And I have redundant serving of the data when needed.