NeilGunton

Yeah, that's an obvious question given these hardware issues. I don't have a fully rational response to that, except to say that I still don't really trust the cloud concept. I guess maybe I'm just old school, but I like to have full control over the server, down to the metal. I like that I can spec a really nice RAID10 setup with 8 drives, giving me very predictable IO performance. I also like that I'm not at the mercy of random outages in what are extremely complex, multi-layered systems that I have no control over. My site is of a size that can very well be hosted on a single box, in fact this box can do a lot more without breaking a sweat. The problem with this downtime is really unusual, having to bring everything to a screeching halt just so I can send the server to a different physical datacenter seems like an argument against hosting your own hardware, but it really doesn't happen very often. Also, remember that there have been big outages with all the cloud providers lately, so nothing is immune to downtime. At least my downtime is under my control, and I know how to fix it. Then there's just the simple security of knowing exactly where your data is. But of course there are arguments to be made the other way too - as I said, it's not a fully rational thing, more like an intuitive preference for being in full control right down to the hardware. I do feel like I actually get better performance this way, with everything running on a single local box, rather than relying on all those abstraction layers and distributed services that AWS etc entail. I know that when I've used websites that are hosted on the cloud, they often just don't seem as responsive and "zippy" as one that is hosted on a dedicated server.

Neil