@Jamie Yes it would be cheaper to have your own but it’s hard to beat 100% uptime. Also are you factoring in the cost of paying someone to maintain your cloud as well as power redundancy, offsite backup etc.

We too are users of the H365 cloud and have been impressed with its reliability and uptime. Word of warning though you need to carefully choose what to put in the cloud. We had some extremely hard working Apache VM’s running load balanced in the H365 cloud for a while but in the end we were forced to clone them to physical machines as performance of both our VM’s and the cloud itself was at risk.

Totally agree with you that a utility model of paying for what you use would definitely drive more people to using this cloud solution. As great as H365 support is the process of deploying and configuring VM’s is still slow and a very manual process. However the diversity and complexity of the VLAN’s etc that they will create for you put the H365 solution in our minds higher than a basic EC2 or gogrid VM – where their business model is based on large volumes rather than quality customers.

From a reliability point of view the cloud is great for customers and a clever way for H365 to milk their assets to make the most of them. If you have lots of VM’s you may consider building your own cloud though as this would ultimately be cheaper – this is our middle-long term goal here at JSWeb.

Cheers
Jamie

I take your points on automation, cost and a user CP – these are all things we are aware of – and we have some creative ideas on how to give the Cloud Platform a more widespread appeal!

We welcome any feedback – so keep it coming !!

Cheers,
Ed.