Cloud hosting, use it or no?

[fris]

Curious who uses cloud hosting, and what good prices are for it.

[heymatty]

I was just looking at rackspaces cloud hosting plans for a mainstream thing today. Haven't hit the buy button just yet though.

[Brad Mitchell]

Not yet but soon, very soon.....

[split_joel]

We are testing our cloud network right now, you should def buy it if you found the right provider.

[L0stMind]

I don't like clouds.

The virtualisation layer causes a significant performance loss. I have intel atom servers that perform way better then vps's and cloud servers with double and triple the resources of the atom... and the atom is a real slow ass server.

I happen to have the privilege of dozens of servers in my office for testing purposes. I've tested a lot of virtualised configurations. Is the "cloud" scalable? yah. Is it easy to manage? yah. Is it fast? no. Is it a good value for your $$? no. The "cloud" may be hosting 2.0 but that doesn't mean it's the way to go or a better value then hosting 1.0.

Just to offer a counter point of view.

[SweetT]

I have had this same conversation 3-5 times per week for the past 2 years and the only concrete thing that I can come up with is that there is nothing concrete about it....yet. The funny thing is that if you ask 5 different KNOWLEDGEABLE people what cloud hosting is, you will get 3 or more different answers.

We have been testing cloud solutions for at least 18 months and have been doing deep research and we keep coming up with the same conclusion....it works well in certain instances but for high performance, high speed web hosting it is just not quite there yet. With that said, for a Disaster Recovery solution it seems like the perfect solution. For archival of files, pictures, videos, etc it is great. The commonality here is that these applications do not need the same speed of delivery as your web site and in our managed hosting solution that is our forte and one of the only concerns that we have so we are not willing to use it in that application. We are utilizing it for back ups and other DR work, but not in a production environment.

Notice, that I said the word YET in this post a few times. There is a part of me that thinks that we are onto something that could be great....but for right now, it is my personal opinion that it offers the same pros and cons as an old fashioned shared/virtual/vps/semi-dedicated server it is just that it uses more than one server to do the sharing.


--T

[L0stMind]

Yup, pretty much my feelings too.

We'll all be using "cloud" everything in a few years (if privacy concerns don't get in the way) but for the here and now it's simply not the high performance, scalable solution we want it to be.

[peedy]

Cloud hosting does not always mean virtualization and vice versa. I use VMware and Citrix enterprise virtualization for some clients I do IT for and they are rock solid.

[blazin]

We've tried it at our company and even deployed enterprise scale apps into virtualised environments... It runs like a dog...

We've ditched it since....

[digifan]

Webair has it.

http://www.webair.com/NAS-storage-hosting-plans.htm and http://www.webair.com/content-delivery-network.htm

[email protected]
ICQ: 243116321
AIM: WebairGH
Toll Free: 1.866.WEBAIR1
http://www.webair.com

[L0stMind]

Cloud hosting does not always mean virtualization and vice versa. I use VMware and Citrix enterprise virtualization for some clients I do IT for and they are rock solid.

Sure, some people are calling it "utility" hosting when it's in reference to actual servers being added on demand.

But at that point, the companies ordering the cloud services have to be very technically skilled - able to setup, maintain, expand and shrink your own clusters on the fly, purchase new services via api on the fly, etc etc.

It's not some magical technology that lets a webmaster take his vbulletin site, upload it to the cloud and it just works, whether he has 80 users or 8000.

There are some very neat projects out there where people are trying to do this the right way, but none are even near production ready.

[noxion]

If you are trying to multiply your "points of failure" the cloud is perfect

[Spudstr]

Not sure about this can't push signifigant bandwidth stuff, we have a few vms pushing 200+Mbps.. Its all about how its built and designed.

[Techie Media]

We also have been testing this for the past 6 months and at the present time we cannot find any significant benefits to this type of system (as SweetT said) YET.
If in fact it does become a viable option/benefit of course it will be an option here at TechieMedia.

[Machete_]

I think its usefull, but not as much in webhosting.

Im thinking more in the terms of "Software as a service", application hosting solutions and general IT infrastructure. It have taken a good step closer with the latest Windows Server OS series.

When it comes to standard simple hosting, its not really where the strength is if you ask me. But as a IT infrastructure I really love it.

Maybe when the SSD's become fast and cheap enough, it would be profitable to start building huge clusters for virtualization, and stop worring about webserver crashes

[AdultSoftwareSolutions]

Depends on what you mean by cloud hosting I guess. I use VPS servers for small stuff but for big sites you might as well just use a real machine. It's easier to provision servers if you need to scale up and down. This can be useful if you know you will have a lot of traffic but it will only be for a short while. No point in having expensive servers when you only need it for a week. There are a lot of companies offering VPS solutions now. I don't like the Amazon EC2 type solutions that much though. They seem really overpriced and a lot of them don't allow adult (Amazon doesn't allow it).

[HorseShit]

I would bet money you guys that say, "it's not quite there yet speed wise" are missing something somewhere, I'd love to hear of a few configurations you guys have tried I guarantee they can be greatly approved upon.

[digifan]

I just got the July Webair Newsletter and I am a satisfied VPS server owner. Let me copy it here s it is.

What's New at Webair.com
JULY 2009

Webair Expands VPS Cloud Platform!


With the continued demand for virtualization Webair expands VPS Cloud Storage capacity by over 100% while also increasing CPU and memory resources!

Webair's VPS infrastructure is built on multiple scalable Cloud technologies providing the redundancy and scalability not found in traditional VPS plans. Dynamic storage ability allows clients to increase storage resources as needed.

The WEBAIR VPS Difference:

# FULLY REDUNDANT - While most VPS software virtualizes an account on a single server, Webair VPS accounts are virtualized across an entire dedicated server farm which is fully redundant, creating an environment with no single point of failure!

# SPEED - Data is stored and served from multiple nodes and drives significantly improving speed!!

# FREE BACKUPS/SNAPSHOTS - Restore files from snapshots instantly!

# FULLY MANAGED - VPS plans are Fully Managed and monitored 24 hours a day 7 days a week!.

# SCALABILITY - The combination of Webair Cloud Storage with VMWARE software for virtualization you now have the ability to be expand all resources on your VPS hosting plan. Both storage and memory can be allocated instantly and dynamically as your business grows.

Webair Virtual Private Servers offers the convenience of being on your own operating system giving webmasters flexibility and the ability to grow seamlessly without incurring downtime due to hardware upgrades!

View all Webair VPS Plans including the new Power and Super Virtual Private Server plans!


WEBAIR SECURITY CENTER

The Security Center located in the Webair Control Panel offers advanced security features and tools to help you keep your sites secure:

WEBAIR ADVANCED SECURITY FEATURE
works by hardening the permissions on your websites to thwart any compromise of your sites/files via vulnerable scripts that may have been installed.

PERMISSION SCANNER
will scan your websites for any files or directories that are group (775) or world writable (777). Files or directories which have these permissions may be modified maliciously by vulnerable 3rd party scripts that may be installed on your account.

VIRUS SCANNER
will scan and detect files located on your hosting account that may be infected by viruses or may have been hacked. It does so by looking for signatures common to trojans and virus propagation programs. This tool will automatically clean any files found to have such infection.

ACCOUNT PASSPHRASE OPTION
provides you with an extra layer of protection for your account. Any request submitted to Webair support, via phone or live chat will require the passphrase to be provided. You can use this feature if you wish to give out your control panel login/password to authorized contacts, but do not wish them to have any access to make permanent changes to your account through Webair support.

[Brad Mitchell]

I congratulate Webair on launching their commercial product, that took some balls and effort.

All of us hosts will be playing show and tell by next year with our own iterations. Best of luck guys

Cheers,

Brad

[Bird]

I have been messing with Aptana along with their IDE for app development.

http://www.aptana.com
http://www.aptana.com/cloud

[Phil21]

Sure, some people are calling it "utility" hosting when it's in reference to actual servers being added on demand.

But at that point, the companies ordering the cloud services have to be very technically skilled - able to setup, maintain, expand and shrink your own clusters on the fly, purchase new services via api on the fly, etc etc.

It's not some magical technology that lets a webmaster take his vbulletin site, upload it to the cloud and it just works, whether he has 80 users or 8000.

There are some very neat projects out there where people are trying to do this the right way, but none are even near production ready.

This description sums it up 100%. Period.

"Cloud" hosting is great, if you have an application which needs and supports elastic demand. There is no magical product yet on the market, that lets you upload your crappy PHP script and have it scale infinitely.

I think at some point someday we'll get there - but we are a LONG way off from the "invisible" cloud in the hosting market.

That said, there are definite uses for on-demand computing. Just not for your average webmaster with a few dedicated servers pushing websites

[Iron Fist]

What happens if the clouds turn into storm clouds... do you have backup clouds?

[WebairGerard]

Guys yes the term "cloud" can be vague and refer to many things depending on what you read and who you talk to. Webair has many cloud based services, here's a breakdown of what we offer today:

Webair Cloud Storage - Your dedicated server or load balanced clusters can use cloud storage in place of local hard drive storage, content servers, or NAS/SAN device. Your content will be stored on a cloud of 100+ storage devices in the same datacenter as your server (or in multiple datacenters if you have a geo-LB setup).

Advantages being:

1) Endless storage - you never have to worry about adding more disk drives, having to take servers down for storage upgrades, etc. The cloud will look like its 100+TB to your machine.

2) Drive failures - never have to be down again because a critical drive that holds your content has failed or have to wait for backups to be restored, etc.

3) Additional redundancy - if a drive fails in one of our storage servers, or even if a group of the servers fail there is no outage for you. In fact you wouldn't even notice any issue. We take care of all of this on the backend. If you have a single content server or NAS/SAN today, you have a single point of failure. Our cloud totally eliminates that and the need to pay for a redundant box that does nothing until the primary fails. Your server/cluster will have 2 redundant connections to the cloud which are either gigabit or 10gigabit.

4) Speed - you're only going to get so much speed out of 1 drive in your server, or even a raid5 with 5-10 drive, its pure physics based on the spindle speed of the drives. With our cloud storage you benefit from having literally hundreds of spindles serving up your content. There is also a huge amount of cache which would be returning your content without even having to reach the spindles. Our clusters are currently pushing 30+Gbps of content and are expandable to 500+Gbps. This will increase the life and use you'll get out of your server by not having to upgrade it prematurely because of i/o bottlenecks.

5) Backups - our cloud storage includes built in snapshots. By default we take daily snapshots and keep them for a week. You can access these snapshots directly via FTP or SSH, see exactly how ALL your content looked each day for the last 7 days and simply copy any files you need to your life file system. We also fully backup the clouds to secondary clusters as well. You can customize your snapshot frequency and retention yourself as well.

6) Cost - You only pay for what you use. Why buy a server with 2TB of storage because you think you may need it in 6 months or a year? You'll be paying for all that extra storage for months! With our cloud storage you only pay for what you use and you can scale to unlimited storage without any growing pains.

--------------

Webair VPS - As posted above from our Newsletter, Webair VPS is cloud based as well - Our VPS service is unlike others in respect to:

1) It sits on top of our Cloud Storage, so you benefit from all of the above features. Grow your VPS storage as needed and pay for only what you use.

2) Redundancy - your VPS will sit on top of a farm of MULTIPLE physical servers. The resources that are allocated to you (CPU/memory/disk) are guaranteed. You don't have to worry about other VPSs consuming too many resources. We simply add more physical machines to our farms to increase resources and everything balances itself automatically on the backend. If a physical machine dies or multiple physical machines die, your VPS stays online.

3) Migration - Webair can take a 'live image' of any UNIX (bsd/linux) or Windows based server at any other host and turn it into a VPS server within a matter of hours. No software has to be reinstalled, no content copies, no reconfiguration. This is technology we built in house which is rock solid and has been used many times. You'll login to the machine and everything will be exactly as it was on the physical machine. Our VPS can mimic either 32bit or 64bit operating systems so no binary files need to be recompiled.

This means a Webair VPS has no single point of failure, which makes it much more redundant than any single dedicated server. You can also upgrade resources instantly (CPU/memory) without having to take anything down. From a management standpoint it all works as if it was the same as a physical server, you can see MRTG graphs for your port usage, hard reboot the server from our control panel if it becomes unresponsive, etc.


Our newest offering is a cloud computing product which sits on top of our cloud storage and our VPS products. It provides for aggregate on-demand resources utilization allowing you to scale your CPU needs as needed. As mentioned in some other posts, this is where it can start to get technical and where the client needs to put some work into using it
properly.

HOWEVER, all that said our Cloud Storage offering is a simple drop in replacement for your local storage. ANYONE can use it without having to be technical or even make any changes to scripts/programs/ftp/etc. The same goes for our VPS product, it looks and feels like any other dedicated server, it just happens to have a more redundancy.

Hit me up if you would like more info regarding these products. Please note that our cloud storage can even be used for servers at other hosts for offsite backups, snapshots, or even to simply have a warm copy of your data sitting ready to go live should your server ever crash as part of a disaster recovery plan.

Thanks for reading

[fris]

my host started to offer cloud at 30mbps with 230 gigs of san storage, 5 gigs of ram, and 9.20gighz garutanteed cpu

[raymor]

Cloud hosting, use it or no?

Get a cloud solution if you need it, don't get it if you don't have some
problem you intend to solve through cloud concepts.

We use and develop cloud and VPS systems for some purposes, but NOT for your
typical adult site. In fact, I have one of our cloud storage units in the office at the
moment. It has 20 hard drives currently active. Cloud concepts are right for this
application where we need dozens of terabytes of disk space. We also use cloud
concepts where we have need to run an independent server just to run one little
program - no web site, no email, just one little program running on a virtual machine
with 256 MB of RAM and 4GB of disk. It would be silly to have a physical server
with just 256 MB of ram and a 400 Mhz CPU for one little program, so the cloud
answers that need. If you need a cloud, you'll know it, or at least you'll know you
have an unusual problem, and your server admin will know the right solution - which
may involve something to do with a cloud, but probably not.

Though we have our own cloud for the things we need a cloud for, all of our web
sites run on standard servers. The typical web site will gain little or nothing from
a cloud platform , but will notice the problems associated with a cloud, particularly
a cloud that's more than about 6 months old. Performance is one issue, and there
are others. So "should I get cloud hosting?" is a lot like "should I get twelve webcams?" -
only if you have a good reason to.

[peedy]

I wonder if you have to use webair servers to use their cloud storage or can I use my current server at a different host.

[WebairGerard]

I wonder if you have to use webair servers to use their cloud storage or can I use my current server at a different host.

our cloud storage can even be used for servers at other hosts for offsite backups, snapshots, or even to simply have a warm copy of your data sitting ready to go live should your server ever crash as part of a disaster recovery plan.

[webair]

Hey Guys,

We just completed an upgrade of our cloud computing infrastructure, the overall capacity has been increased by 250%!! We have invested heavily in our cloud hosting making it fully redundant in multiple locations!!

I welcome anyone to hit me up for a FREE TRIAL!

Tony and Jim -

I beg to differ..

THE WEBAIR CLOUD HOSTING SOLUTIONS have been a HUGE success for Webair, and our clients alike! We had the foresight to offer WEBAIR CLOUD HOSTING over a year ago primarily to offer Webair clients yet another avenue to save on their hosting costs. As you can see from Gerard's post above THERE ARE MANY OTHER BENEFITS to cloud hosting solutions.

*Note you do not have to be a webair client to utilize all of the benefits our cloud hosting solutions offer.

Again, I invite you to contact us and let me show you how we can save you money and enhance your current web hosting solutions.

FREE TRIALS!!!

[BardMan]

Cloud has been blazing fast for me. thanks again guys for setting me up. I would hit up mike or gerard on this.. FREE TRIALS? thats a super great deal. thanks again!!

[Brad Mitchell]

Hey Guys,

We just completed an upgrade of our cloud computing infrastructure, the overall capacity has been increased by 250%!! We have invested heavily in our cloud hosting making it fully redundant in multiple locations!!

I welcome anyone to hit me up for a FREE TRIAL!

Tony and Jim -

I beg to differ..

THE WEBAIR CLOUD HOSTING SOLUTIONS have been a HUGE success for Webair, and our clients alike! We had the foresight to offer WEBAIR CLOUD HOSTING over a year ago primarily to offer Webair clients yet another avenue to save on their hosting costs. As you can see from Gerard's post above THERE ARE MANY OTHER BENEFITS to cloud hosting solutions.

*Note you do not have to be a webair client to utilize all of the benefits our cloud hosting solutions offer.

Again, I invite you to contact us and let me show you how we can save you money and enhance your current web hosting solutions.

FREE TRIALS!!!

Bump for the only cloud solution in the adult marketplace that delivers so far..

Brad

[webair]

Thanks Brad!

[flip.green]

There are pros and cons to it

The high points being that they are easy to backup, replicate, and restore. It's also flexible in the sense that you can go from very small footprint configurations to large

Low points being that if the provider sucks in general your slice of their grid will suck as well and perhaps particularly bad. The technology is still fairly new and many companies are just getting on the wagon

Perhaps the best thing about these solutions is that they are easy to jump into and use right away and just as easy to walk away from.

[Pleasurepays]

Depends on what you mean by cloud hosting I guess. I use VPS servers for small stuff but for big sites you might as well just use a real machine. It's easier to provision servers if you need to scale up and down. This can be useful if you know you will have a lot of traffic but it will only be for a short while. No point in having expensive servers when you only need it for a week. There are a lot of companies offering VPS solutions now. I don't like the Amazon EC2 type solutions that much though. They seem really overpriced and a lot of them don't allow adult (Amazon doesn't allow it).

why do you think amazon doesn't allow adult?

[SGS]

We have been on cloud storage with Webair for a while now and love it.

[webair]

We have been on cloud storage with Webair for a while now and love it.

Awesome!

Our Cloud Hosting Options have much to offer in the way of savings, performance, flexibility & scalability. If you are interested in seeing how we can save you money NO MATTER WHERE YOU CURRENTLY HOST please feel free to contact us for a FREE TRIAL!

[webair]

Curious who uses cloud hosting, and what good prices are for it.

Did you end up using a cloud solution? just curious

[digifan]

Awesome!

Our Cloud Hosting Options have much to offer in the way of savings, performance, flexibility & scalability. If you are interested in seeing how we can save you money NO MATTER WHERE YOU CURRENTLY HOST please feel free to contact us for a FREE TRIAL!

Awesome indeed

[tetsuo001100]

on this same thread line, before i can ask another question, when you guys are talking about performance issues from using the cloud, (database servers aside, not included) what are your applications/sites you guys running on the clouds you tested with made in? are they straight html sites, or php database driven sites?

[fris]

Did you end up using a cloud solution? just curious

havent decided yet.

[Klen]

my host started to offer cloud at 30mbps with 230 gigs of san storage, 5 gigs of ram, and 9.20gighz garutanteed cpu

They not just started it's been a while that.I will use it when i will need more bandwith instead ordering new server,it will cost me 2x less and i will get same shit.

[tetsuo001100]

my host started to offer cloud at 30mbps with 230 gigs of san storage, 5 gigs of ram, and 9.20gighz garutanteed cpu

who offered this?

[gwidomains]

Curious who uses cloud hosting, and what good prices are for it.

No, most people don't need it. Why bother with it?

[DaddyHalbucks]

It sounds like good future technology, but have all the bugs really been worked out of it yet?

[Supz]

I don't like clouds.

The virtualisation layer causes a significant performance loss. I have intel atom servers that perform way better then vps's and cloud servers with double and triple the resources of the atom... and the atom is a real slow ass server.

I happen to have the privilege of dozens of servers in my office for testing purposes. I've tested a lot of virtualised configurations. Is the "cloud" scalable? yah. Is it easy to manage? yah. Is it fast? no. Is it a good value for your $$? no. The "cloud" may be hosting 2.0 but that doesn't mean it's the way to go or a better value then hosting 1.0.

Just to offer a counter point of view.

I am sorry to say. You have no idea what you are talking about. Do you know that 100% of the fortune 100 use virtualization in there production environment. Do you know about 95% of the fortune 1000 use virtualization in a production environment? If there were performance issues. I do not think this would be the case.

A. If you do not have a server that is prepared for virtualization you should not be using it. (yes HP & Dell servers do have a configuration in the BIOS to set it up for Virtualization. It should be atleast Dual Quad Core with 32 Gigs of RAM minimal. Hopefully anyone running a Cloud service is smart enough to use Blades. )
B. I have yet to see a hosting provider offer SAS Harddrives. Let alone a good SAN solution.(if you are not using a fiberchannel SAN, an iSCSI SAN then there is no point on running virtualization in your production environment).

VPS is a form of cloud hosting. It already exists and is being used.

The major issue with the Cloud is security. Here is a nice article I read today about Cloud & Security. I wont rant on about this. Just read the article.

http://www.cio.com/article/499144/Fi...loud_Computing

[tetsuo001100]

@supz,

we're interested in testing clouds for our platform, do you have any good recommendations for providers? right now i'm looking at rackspace because its 4 cents cheaper for the same package at amazon. but would love any input.

i think the main thing i see from a virtualization vs dedicated server standpoint, is in the purpose of what you're using the product for. Also in the way you're application/site is coded. if you're running a straight php/cgi database driven site where you get massive traffic, then IMO you're in for a hurting no matter what you use if you're site isn't running some form of caching. Aside from our tube sites at the moment we use no PHP in our sites mainly because i refuse to lend assistance to a technology that too many people improperly use (complete database driven site). Sites should be coded either in an event driven fashion (ie CMS updates a page, or comment made, etc) or on a schedule, ie, once a day, or hour, etc. This is how i've coded our cms/sites because there's no need for immediate database connectivity data pulling.

Poor programming/and forethought leads to heavy applications, which leads to needing more equipment and more cost. imagine running your same site having less cost? I will say though that there are exceptions to the rule that you just cant get away from like ad serving. but so far i haven't seen anything that has dissuaded me from testing with virtualization, except maybe bandwidth costs. unless i can find someone that will give me a dedicated amount of bandwidth up front and anything over that is extra, like i have now with our dedicated servers.

[digifan]

Did I mention webair already? It's fun to be in the clouds... heaven

[Mr. Billy]

I don't have a complete understanding of all of the things that the term cloud hosting entails.

If you look at one scenario that I have heard described when talking about the cloud, operating systems, and applications will be hosted on the cloud and not on your computer. They will also be maintained and updated by the operator of the particular company you obtain the services from. You would not need to buy expensive software suites, but you would pay only for the time use them. This does sound nice.

If you look at the introduction of the ATM machine or the debit card, many of the concerns were the same as those voiced about cloud computing. Security, reliability and ease of access. For the most part, with a few glaring exceptions that pop up now and then, these problems have been dealt with to the point that people would not think of operating without these conveniences.

It will be interesting to watch this play out over time.

[sysk]

Cloud is ideal for the SaaS model or any software that needs to be scaled on demand. It's good for running software that is designed to run in the cloud...

However, I wouldn't use it for the old school FTP model, where you edit your website directly or play around with static HTML files a lot.

If you want to opt for cloud hosting, the software running your site has to be designed to run in the cloud.

[tetsuo001100]

i think we're all getting a few things mixed up here, cloud "hosting" vs cloud servers. i'm not sure about cloud hosting, as it's not something i've ever entertained a thought for, same as shared hosting.

however cloud servers are just like VPS servers in which its a rooted server you control. your "virtual" cloud server may be split between several physical servers, but you are in complete control over what software is on it and gets put on it.

[webair]

i think we're all getting a few things mixed up here, cloud "hosting" vs cloud servers. i'm not sure about cloud hosting, as it's not something i've ever entertained a thought for, same as shared hosting.

however cloud servers are just like VPS servers in which its a rooted server you control. your "virtual" cloud server may be split between several physical servers, but you are in complete control over what software is on it and gets put on it.

Exactly..there are may uses for "cloud hosting" and may uses for "cloud
storage" alike. It all depends upon your unique setup. We offer MULTIPLE
CLOUD BASED SERVICES. Some are storage based only, so you can still
utilize your existing physical servers/assests, and some allow you to
consolidate your physical servers to cloud computing and cut costs while
gaining redudancy.

One instance in particular that has been very popular service for us is
our CLOUD STORAGE SOLUTION. This is a service that can be used NO MATTER WHERE YOU HOST. Some advantages are:

1) Endless storage - you never have to worry about adding more disk drives, having to take servers down for storage upgrades, etc. The cloud will look like its 100+TB to your machine.

2) Drive failures - never have to be down again because a critical drive that holds your content has failed or have to wait for backups to be restored, etc.

3) Additional redundancy - if a drive fails in one of our storage servers, or even if a group of the servers fail there is no outage for you. In fact you wouldn't even notice any issue. We take care of all of this on the backend. If you have a single content server or NAS/SAN today, you have a single point of failure. Our cloud totally eliminates that and the need to pay for a redundant box that does nothing until the primary fails. Your server/cluster will have 2 redundant connections to the cloud which are either gigabit or 10gigabit.

4) Speed - you're only going to get so much speed out of 1 drive in your server, or even a raid5 with 5-10 drive, its pure physics based on the spindle speed of the drives. With our cloud storage you benefit from having literally hundreds of spindles serving up your content. There is also a huge amount of cache which would be returning your
content without even having to reach the spindles. Our clusters are currently pushing 30+Gbps of content and are expandable to 500+Gbps. This will increase the life and use you'll get out of your server by not having to upgrade it prematurely because of i/o bottlenecks.

5) Backups - our cloud storage includes built in snapshots. By default we take daily snapshots and keep them for a week. You can access these snapshots directly via FTP or SSH, see exactly how ALL your content looked each day for the last 7 days and simply copy any files you need to your life file system. We also fully backup the clouds to secondary clusters as well. You can customize your snapshot frequency and retention yourself as well.

6) Cost - You only pay for what you use. Why buy a server with 2TB of storage because you think you may need it in 6 months or a year? You'll be paying for all that extra storage for months! With our cloud storage you only pay for what you use and you can scale to unlimited storage without any growing pains.