A very outspoken post over at The Register makes it very clear what the risks are in this debate. While Cloud Computing is the current “big thing” and everybody seems to be getting in on the act - and we’re even assessing how it fits into future web development plans - there is still a solid argument for sticking with dedicated servers.

The reason is principally one of reliability and accountability, or more to the point that you can call somebody at 3am when the dedicated servers that you are paying hard currency for fail and know that somebody is feverishly scurrying around a data centre ensuring your SLA is upheld. As Ted Dziuba put it:

No matter what the name, you, the developer, will still be dealing with reliability and accountability. Using someone else’s infrastructure for your application will forever be a business risk, but it sounds so much less so with a cuddly name. Your CTO will fall for the next cycle pretty easily. The compunction he feels for his latest data center build-out will outweigh the downsides of an external dependency.

Clouds have been notoriosly unreliable in the recent past (I am sure this will be remedied as Clouds are in their infancy in terms of infrastructures) and it can be very embarrassing when your data goes off-line for a long period, or your applications are down without warning. More to the point - who do you call, and how do you know they are fixing “your” problem when you are just renting a small corner of a nebulous, fluid environment (aether) which (theoretically) provides failover and mirroring to prevent just such an occurrence? When one server goes wrong it can be more easily diagnosed and fixed, but when a segment of the Cloud goes offline, it may be symptomatic of a wider disturbance in the aether.

If you are using Cloud-based systems, you might like to check out Hyperic’s Cloud Status Monitor at http://www.cloudstatus.com/