Demystifying Cloud Misconceptions to Justify Relevance of Dedicated Solutions

In a technology driven universe of IT, we tend to underestimate some of the valuable solutions that may continue to be highly beneficial in spite of being conventional. Due to hullabaloo of cloud discussions coupled with cloud’s marketing hype, the advantages of dedicated server hosting for an enterprise IT infrastructure are being sidelined.

Myths about dedicated and cloud computing

There are few misconceptions surrounding use of different cloud offerings as well as dedicated hosting solutions. It would be better to clear such misconception for gaining better clarity in a cloudy environment.

Private cloud offers the topmost security

There is a general feeling that private cloud is the most secured place for handling mission critical data. In fact one can achieve required level of security in a dedicated server hosting itself. In fact, one can design the most relevant security solution for any given infrastructure. It is found that a dedicated solution has greater capability of offering wider options and more robust control for meeting compliance and security objectives.

Dedicated server hosting is full of complexities

On the contrary, dedicated solutions can mitigate complexities in several use cases. It enables users to implement changes in configurations as well as customization by supporting a single tenant application which is not possible in a shared environment. There is better control as well flexibility in dedicated hosting ecosystem than cloud computing with greater flexibility to achieve compliance, security, and performance for meeting requirements of specific applications.

There are multiple layers of complexities in cloud infrastructure. For example, you cannot expect to get your IP addresses automatically associated with cloud instances as you start and stop these periodically. IP address needs to be re-associated every time the cloud instance is started. If your requirement is only to have a simple hosting solution, then a single dedicated server is totally justified. You need to ask yourself if there is no need to implement a complex infrastructure, the why one should adopt it.

Cloud offers better performance

The fact is, one can achieve superior performance with dedicated solution if there is a comparison of performance level achieved for every dollar spent. It has been observed that cloud solution cannot overtake a properly configured dedicated server in terms of performance.

Since underlying networks and storage resources continue to be shared among large base of users in cloud computing, there is a high degree of unpredictability in terms of disk I/O. There is a possibility of your performance getting slowed down, if another account sends huge volumes of requests to storage arrays. In addition to this, there are chances of bottlenecks since the upstream network is being shared as well.

It is observed that cloud providers cannot support faster storage even though they would be in a position to offer larger storage. Most of the performance related issues in cloud VPS are fund to be associated with disk I/O. Scaling disk I/O is not achievable. The more reliable alternative would be to use a dedicated server with RAID 10 to achieve greater disk I/O than most of the complex and costlier cloud solutions.  
Cloud has inherent redundancy

This is yet another misconception about cloud computing. One must appreciate that a compute node in cloud offering is as reliable as any physical server. It is just like a server sans storage. If anything happens to the compute node in cloud then users are most likely to lose their workloads. This scenario closely resembles failure of power, RAM, or CPU in a physical server environment.

The process of achieving redundancy in cloud is highly complex and may be a overkill for simple workloads since it needs to integrate multiple cloud instances. Hence a dedicated solution is much more redundant than a simple cloud offering.

Cloud solutions are more affordable

This is far from truth, especially for small firms such as a small web marketing firm that offers hosting of customer sites. The common requirements are a control panel such as cPanel or Plesk for hosting and CMS applications. Even after adding some technical applications to ensure reliability of performance, a dedicated solution would be more cost effective than a cloud offering. In one of the comparisons between cost of dedicated server plan and cloud plan it is found that the cloud costs twice compared with dedicated.

Cloud offers ease of migration

Getting locked-in into a cloud vendor’s platform is in fact, the most serious issue with cloud environment. Cloud migration can not only be expensive but also painful. This especially true if cloud user starts integrating complex features offered by a particular vendor. Getting locked in solutions can prove to be hazardous if the services, prices, or support level is changed by the vendor. This underlines need to assess options for migration before embracing cloud adoption.

In conclusion

Every small business that does not need complex operations of hosting must evaluate the option of dedicated hosting instead of getting lured by marketing talk of aggressive cloud vendors. A properly configured and managed dedicated server is a highly reliable and secure option that delivers far greater performance at much lower costs than cloud offerings.