Infrastructure

There has been a lot of talk over the last few years about outsourcing your infrastructure to companies like Amazon’s AWS service, or Rackspace’s Cloud Servers and others.

This mentality is wrong, for most people.

Today we are in the middle of a massive Amazon outage that has been going on for many hours already, and no concrete time frame is available for when it will come online again, which brings me to my first point: using a service like AWS means you don’t get the one-on-one customer support you need when running a business that has critical needs, like 100% uptime.

Sure there are ways to load balance between available zones, but as today proves, even that doesn’t always work. In order to be truly available, you need multiple datacenters and those datacenters must from from multiple providers and be far apart from each other, like one on the east coast and the other on the west coast.

My other point is related to billing. Cloud servers ARE NOT CHEAPER, when you run them 24/7. Many people have cited cost savings as the main reason to use AWS. I don’t know about you, but every time I have tested this theory, it always worked out that it was cheaper to use dedicated servers than it did using a virtualized server. Additionally, with virtualized servers, you typically also get reduced disk I/O, network latency and more which make your service run slower.

How many services need to scale up and down their infrastructure daily? Far less than you might think. Today, Foursquare, Quora, CoTweet, Hootsuite, and I’m sure dozen’s more of popular services are offline because of the AWS outage. The only one I see that is likely benefiting from scaling up and down servers is probably Foursquare, the rest probably have their servers running 24/7.

Until recently we’ve always hosted our servers at Steadfast Networks. In the recent months, we switched to using ServerBeach as our primary provider. With both of them, we’ve used multiple dedicated servers in a load balanced, high availability manner. We also use replication and a few other techniques to make sure that our customers data is safe and our service is online all the time. We learned this the hard way in the past.

I know that this post is different from most of our posts on our blog, but we have a lot of experience working with these cloud services, and in that time have determined, they just are not worth it.

We know many people feel strongly about using them.  Feel free to let us know why in the comments below.