How do I decide if I need cloud or dedi? Can I use Linux or Windows?

Many of the providers that call themselves "Cloud" in reality are regular hosting providers who want to get a piece of "cloud cake". So their might be no big difference if you choose one or another. A large difference is if you go with a true cloud provider like Amazon EC2. With EC2 you can use Linux and Windows however I personally would recommend Linux if you are not limited by your application.

I would suggest you to compare the costs and the resource utilization. This would help you to find answer on this question.

How do I decide if I need cloud or dedi? Can I use Linux or Windows?
The final decision will depend on your specific requirements but a cloud hosting environment can offer you (1) on-demand instances (2) instant scalability (3) pay as you go pricing & (4) high availability.

LINUX and Windows, both are available on cloud hosting platforms.

Hope this helps. Cheers! :)

I think cloud is best!

The main benefit of a cloud is not performance but stability and scalability. In terms of performance though, the biggest bottleneck of a VPS is normally the IO, which a true SAN outperforms any local solution.

Oh and not let us forget about our disk I/O speeds. Our tests show the competition who use centralized storage do not even come close, and those that use local storage (and try and claim they are a cloud host) they still do not keep up! Some hosts even offer an upgrade to SSD at a ridiculous price and are still slower!

Between the two, I'd choose Dedicated as you'll have your own hardware and you won't ever, on any level, be sharing your CPU, Ram, Disk Space, Disk I/O, etc... with anybody else :)

There are certainly cloud providers out there that will say that all of your resources are dedicated but ultimately you can and will eventually be affected by others on the same "cloud" :)

Here are some things to consider when making the decision cloud versus dedicated:

1. How durable does your hosting need to be? Meaning, can you deal with a little downtime every once is a while. Many cloud providers are able to offer better durability because your "virtual server" resides on external storage (i.e. SAN). If the physical host your server is running on fails, it'll be automatically migrated to another functioning host with little or no downtime
2. How do you handle backups? Many cloud providers offer automated/scheduled backups of your servers with no downtime or interruption to your service. The backup process simply takes a snapshot of your server.
3. How scalable does your hosting need to be? Cloud providers are great in terms of allowing for almost instant scalability through automated provisioning. In the case of Amazon's EC2 for example you can configure CPU/IO/Network usage thresholds whereby their cloud will automatically launch new servers for you (and on the reverse side, take them back down when your usage declines). Cloud offers a big advantage in this regard as most providers allow you to pay by the hour, instead of monthly for most dedicated providers
4. What's your budget? Cloud providers are often much cheaper to get started out with. Rackspace cloud 256MB servers start at only $11.00/mo for example. Dedicated servers are usually going to run at least $100/mo
5. What are your performance requirements? Cloud providers offer servers in a wide variety of sizes, from very small, resource starved instances to very large servers that will out perform many dedicated servers. However, on the low end, a dedicated server may give you more bang for your buck.

Hope this helps.

Here are some things to consider when making the decision cloud versus dedicated:

1. How durable does your hosting need to be? Meaning, can you deal with a little downtime every once is a while. Many cloud providers are able to offer better durability because your "virtual server" resides on external storage (i.e. SAN). If the physical host your server is running on fails, it'll be automatically migrated to another functioning host with little or no downtime
2. How do you handle backups? Many cloud providers offer automated/scheduled backups of your servers with no downtime or interruption to your service. The backup process simply takes a snapshot of your server.
3. How scalable does your hosting need to be? Cloud providers are great in terms of allowing for almost instant scalability through automated provisioning. In the case of Amazon's EC2 for example you can configure CPU/IO/Network usage thresholds whereby their cloud will automatically launch new servers for you (and on the reverse side, take them back down when your usage declines). Cloud offers a big advantage in this regard as most providers allow you to pay by the hour, instead of monthly for most dedicated providers
4. What's your budget? Cloud providers are often much cheaper to get started out with. Rackspace cloud 256MB servers start at only $11.00/mo for example. Dedicated servers are usually going to run at least $100/mo
5. What are your performance requirements? Cloud providers offer servers in a wide variety of sizes, from very small, resource starved instances to very large servers that will out perform many dedicated servers. However, on the low end, a dedicated server may give you more bang for your buck.

Hope this helps.
Agree with you.

Also the cloud platform can lower the cost threshold for small applications. e.g. You could have a small instance(server) running an application for as low as $15-20/month and have independent control of your server.

If you seek very high computing for a limited period of time, say for batch processing - lets say 1000 servers, each with 2 GB RAM, but only for an hour or two - then a cloud platform allows you the liberty of using it for a few dollars. e.g. This may cost $80-100 for an hour, as compared to having to lease 1000 servers for a month for $100K!

Cheers!

Here are some things to consider when making the decision cloud versus dedicated:

1. How durable does your hosting need to be? Meaning, can you deal with a little downtime every once is a while. Many cloud providers are able to offer better durability because your "virtual server" resides on external storage (i.e. SAN). If the physical host your server is running on fails, it'll be automatically migrated to another functioning host with little or no downtime
2. How do you handle backups? Many cloud providers offer automated/scheduled backups of your servers with no downtime or interruption to your service. The backup process simply takes a snapshot of your server.
3. How scalable does your hosting need to be? Cloud providers are great in terms of allowing for almost instant scalability through automated provisioning. In the case of Amazon's EC2 for example you can configure CPU/IO/Network usage thresholds whereby their cloud will automatically launch new servers for you (and on the reverse side, take them back down when your usage declines). Cloud offers a big advantage in this regard as most providers allow you to pay by the hour, instead of monthly for most dedicated providers
4. What's your budget? Cloud providers are often much cheaper to get started out with. Rackspace cloud 256MB servers start at only $11.00/mo for example. Dedicated servers are usually going to run at least $100/mo
5. What are your performance requirements? Cloud providers offer servers in a wide variety of sizes, from very small, resource starved instances to very large servers that will out perform many dedicated servers. However, on the low end, a dedicated server may give you more bang for your buck.

Hope this helps.

While good information, in some cases it won't always be that case as there are different approaches to cloud:

1) While many cloud providers use SAN or some form of "off server" storage, there are also many who use local storage which can greatly increase IO performance as shown in many benchmarks that have been done here. This too is completely redundant, and the "virtual server" resides on multiple machines just the same.

2) While snapshots is an option, backups in some cloud environments are always inherently done by the cloud infrastructure itself. Ie: with local storage it's automatically backed up to another physical server. While this isn't truly a "backup" and it's more like a network RAID1, it would count if you're looking for a backup solution only for the case of hardware failure (such as if you provide your own software level backup that does not need to be host level, but done inside the "virtual server").

4/5) Just a little confusing as it seems you contradicted yourself a little stating cloud is cheaper to get started with, then go on to say a dedicated server may give you more bang for your buck on the low end. I'm assuming you mean this is due to performance, which if looking only at Amazon, then yeah that may be the case as they are not known for their performance, but some other cloud providers would offer better performance.

One extra piece of information, when you are looking for providers some will use different terminologies. Ie: "instance", "cloud vps", "vds (virtual dedicated server)", "cloud server", etc.. it's tough to differentiate from the buzz words, so try to look at their offering and see exactly what it is. Is it scalable? redundant? what kind of storage does it use? what kind of virtualization technology? Like many things in life.. the quality of the technology will differ between providers. A steak is not just a steak.. there are different grade's, and steakhouse's will prepare it differently. :D

Enterprise VMware hosting is going to offer you absolutely bullet proof reliability which you will never get from a dedicated server. The performance is never going to match bare metal but for mission critical hosting cloud is always going to be the preffered solution.

How do I decide if I need cloud or dedi? Can I use Linux or Windows?

Most clouds are one powerful dedicated server partitioned 16 times that allow you to scale!

I would just get a dedicated server. If you are going to need more resources then a 1gbps unmetered dedicated server would give you then there is a problem. You would spend way to much on a cloud when you could slowly just build a stable of strong servers around the world, host globabally.

If you go with a cloud provider you are going to have either 1 powerful server partitioned or you are going to have a few seperate servers in the same datacenter. I can understand some level of redundancy but wouldn't it be nice to have a cloud with servers scalable at 6 different data centers?

Cloud services are all very different.

Ask your provider:

Do they run tiered storage - ie is their file storage separate from their SQL storage - if they don't you will likely not be satisfied with your database performance.

Is the cloud instance or cloud server you are on guaranteed with full high availability or are you simply on a big VPS box that if it goes down you and another 20 or 30 customers will just be down until they get the box fixed.

What is their virtualization technology - ie is is something high end like vmware or is it a freeware distribution or something without the operational stability and feature rich tools.

Can you do offsite backups for no extra charge on your bandwidth?

This will get you started.

Cloud services are all very different.

Ask your provider:

Do they run tiered storage - ie is their file storage separate from their SQL storage - if they don't you will likely not be satisfied with your database performance.

Is the cloud instance or cloud server you are on guaranteed with full high availability or are you simply on a big VPS box that if it goes down you and another 20 or 30 customers will just be down until they get the box fixed.

What is their virtualization technology - ie is is something high end like vmware or is it a freeware distribution or something without the operational stability and feature rich tools.

Can you do offsite backups for no extra charge on your bandwidth?

This will get you started.

The only thing I would disagree with is freeware virtualization. Xen is the most respected and best performing virtualization technology in the industry, it's free.

The only thing I would disagree with is freeware virtualization. Xen is the most respected and best performing virtualization technology in the industry, it's free.

not the production set with the real management tools.

A stripped down version that is not for full commercialization is.

You must be talking about Citrix's XenServer Essentials. I'm talking about Xen.. the actual hypervisor, not the commercialized platform that Citrix does. But Citrix's XenServer (the free version) is also excellent for a free virtualization technology now that you mention it.

The Xen hypervisor (free) is very much used for commercialization. AppLogic is built on it, Amazon's EC2, Rackspace's public cloud, and many more.

You must be talking about Citrix's XenServer Essentials. I'm talking about Xen.. the actual hypervisor, not the commercialized platform that Citrix does. But Citrix's XenServer (the free version) is also excellent for a free virtualization technology now that you mention it.

The Xen hypervisor (free) is very much used for commercialization. AppLogic is built on it, Amazon's EC2, Rackspace's public cloud, and many more.

if you have a very large budget to write your own managment skin to run it like those guys did. figure on a few million in r/d to get it done.

if you have a very large budget to write your own managment skin to run it like those guys did. figure on a few million in r/d to get it done.

I think we're getting a little sidetracked here. What we're talking about is Cloud, not virtualization. You simply stated to ask this when interviewing cloud providers:

"What is their virtualization technology - ie is is something high end like vmware or is it a freeware distribution or something without the operational stability and feature rich tools."

I'm stating that cloud using "freeware" virtualization is not a problem as a lot of the biggest and best technologies and providers use it. That's all.