May be stupid but : Difference between "The Cloud" and just FTP'ing it to a small dedi

[Chris]

What is the advantage? ppl keep trying to sell me on "cloud storage" and how it would speed up my sites

is it just because it is hosted on a box that doesnt run anything other than files that i need to deliver?

[DVTimes]

from what i have read/seen, cloud storage is for such as online games/films/music.

the idea that you can watch a film direct to your tv or play games online withouit having to own or download them.

so mabe the servers are set up to deliver large files smoothy to lots of people at the same time.

so if its files, it does not matter as if say they dowload a film, to watch once downloaded, its not going to make much difference.

but say they watch the films as they stream, i guess then it may make a difference.

i supose (i could be wrong) that the cloud name is simply to make it sound more user friendly. a bit like an ipod is simply a pocket pc. but calling it an ipad or ipod makes it sound more friendly to people.

so to be honest i do wonder if this term is simply a marketing thing, rather anything technolgically different.

[grumpy]

with cloud you never know where your data is

[bigluv]

you'd do better to ask whoever is using the term exactly what they mean.

[core_dump]

Biggest scam of the decade, if you ask me. Sales based on nothing more than the buzz factor. It made some sense when it was sold simply as a reliability or load balancing scheme. But replacing your fast local storage (say an SSD array) with something fetched from a world away? Come on. Sheesh.

I hear people say "but... but... I can access my data from anywhere!". Umm yeah. You've been able to do that since the 80's. And seamlessly for at least the past 10 years. Try again.

[JamesGw]

Supposedly, cloud is supposed to be more reliable, but that really doesn't seem to be the case in reality. Huge waste of time. Get a dedicated server.

[blackmonsters]

I must say I don't know much about how cloud works but from what I have
heard so far it seems like something that will probably cause me a headache that
I don't need.

[Mike Honcho]

http://www.erikhoward.net/cloud-comp...icated-server/

[DamianJ]

Originally Posted by DVTimes

(i could be wrong)

Of course you, you dribbling spastic.

[ErikH]

Originally Posted by Mike Honcho

Link to my site. Url deleted since I don't have 30 posts yet.

Hey thanks for posting a link to my site.

Like I said in my post, the cloud is not for everyone. It's not the magic bullet most people make it out to be.

At any given point, I have hundreds of servers doing various tasks from encoding video, doing distributed number-crunching, etc...

This is what the cloud is good at, short-lived resource-sucking tasks. I would have wasted a lot more money and time if I bought dedicated servers that were idle 70% of the time.

What you shouldn't do with the cloud is run any I/O intensive operations (eg database) in the cloud. Since all cloud servers are basically VM's. You are sharing disk spindles with others and you will never come close to the disk IO performance of a dedicated server.

So what most people are starting to realize is that they need to move to a hybrid solution. Part of their infrastructure runs in the cloud and mission-critical stuff runs on dedicated servers.

[My Pimp]

bump bump

[CurrentlySober]

A small dedi uses green text and talks crap on GFY...

A cloud floats in the sky and makes us all happy...

[seeandsee]

cloud could be all about speed and security?

[core_dump]

You see what you marketing "geniouses" have done here? See below:

Originally Posted by seeandsee

cloud could be all about speed and security?

Makes me sick. And if you need to distribute processor-intensive stuff, then DO it. But "the magical cloud" isn't a magic answer for that either.