4 Disadvantages of Cloud Hosting

Posted on April 5th, 2010
A blog post by DN (4 Comments)

While cloud computing and storage is a great innovation in the field of hosting, it doesn’t come without its own faults, even though there aren’t many of them (pretty standard for a relatively new technology).
All of these problems will be solved in the coming years, but you do have to take them into consideration if you want to switch from VPS, clusters and dedicated servers to cloud hosting right now.

Higher costs. While in the long run, cloud hosting is a lot cheaper than traditional technologies, the fact that it’s currently new and has to be researched and improved actually makes it more expensive. Data centers have to buy or develop the software that’ll run the cloud, rewire the machines and fix unforeseen problems (which are always there). This makes their initial cloud offers more expensive. Like in all other industries, the first customers pay a higher price and have to deal with more issues than those who switch later (although it would be vey hard to create and improve new technologies without these initial adopters).

Less flexibility. This is only a temporary problem (as the others on this list), but current technologies are still in the testing stages, so they don’t really offer the flexibility they promise. Of course, that’ll change in the future, but some of the current users might have to deal with the facts that their cloud server is difficult or impossible to upgrade without losing some data, for example.

Stability issues. Because cloud hosting is new, there are bound to be stability issues, especially when you connect tens of thousands of machines to operate as one (which has never been applied before on such a wide scale). And, unfortunately, this means that some clients will lose their data if they rely only on cloud backups (which a lot of people do). Even with all of the data center’s assurance of complete security, it’s still a bit more risky to host important data on a virtual cloud server than on a dedicated physical machine.

Less security. This is probably the biggest problem. Because all of the physical machines are interconnected and run one common, base operating system (like the 3Tera Applogic OS) that controls the whole thing, all of the virtual servers are susceptible to hacking attacks and intrusions. This has been and STILL is an issue with VPS servers, where one hacked user account and virtual server can give the attackers access to all of the other client’s data and the physical machine itself. This is very dangerous and undesirable on a machine running a VPS OS with, say, 10 clients. Imagine what would happen if the hackers gained access to thousands of people’s data. It would be nothing less than a catastrophe (especially for businesses) and the data center would pretty much have to stop all or some outgoing data while they solve the problem, which means downtime for not only one, but a lot of clients and their sites/data at once.

Again, these are just temporary problems. Nonetheless, they are pretty real, so if your data and uptime are valuable and you have a good infrastructure that can last for a few more years; you could skip the cloud hosting craze and switch to it later, when the technology will be perfected and the above issues fixed.