I write a lot of different articles about cloud hosting and how it can help companies.  But I haven’t written many articles on how cloud hosting is bad for companies. Many people have asked me “Is cloud hosting a scam?”  Here is why I think cloud hosting is a scam.

The term ‘cloud computing’ has been coined by anyone wanting to make a service sound hip and new. Jumping on the latest bandwagon is huge in the technology industry, but in this case it is creating confusion among customers that don’t know much about hosting, and for customers who are unsure what they should be asking for.  There is a lot of hype about cloud hosting and I don’t want you to get caught up in it.  I’m not saying all cloud hosting is a scam, but it is a scam to the average person that has no clue what they are doing.

Clarification on cloud hosting: cloud computing is a form of outsourcing by which vendors supply computing services to lots of customers over the internet.  These cloud services can range from applications, such as customer relationship management, to infrastructure, such as storage and the provision of development platforms.

Cloud Hosting services are provided by datacenters that are scalable, running hundreds of thousands of CPUs (computers) as a single compute engine, using virtualization technology. The cloud approach means workloads are distributed across multiple machines known as cloud clusters.  These cloud clusters can be located in multiple datacenters — and capacity can be allocated or scaled back according to a customer’s needs.

Most people haven’t even begun to understand the huge implications of cloud computing, and the majority of cloud hosting companies are not very good at explaining any of it.

Here are 20 Issue that cloud hosting companies don’t tell you.

1. Switching to the cloud is easy…  This statement is completely FALSE.  It is not easy and it takes A LOT OF WORK.  You need to have someone that knows what they are doing.  YOU have to be the one to take charge.  Don’t rely on any cloud hosting company to do it for you.  Rely on yourself and your team, not theirs.  Their is no magic “flip a switch” and your site will switch to the cloud.
2. DNS manager issues… I have many DNS records for my domain and it seems that the DNS manager isn’t so forgiving.
3. It gives you the ability (or you think so) to delete an individual record however I have never been able to do that. It would always return with an error which is quite annoying. So I moved my DNS servers to another location and have been happy since.
4. Chat support is too much like Dell tech support. The first person you get doesn’t really know what he is talking about (I have been talking with them a few times about the above mentioned DNS issues and they confirmed multiple bugs within the system but this was at level 2 support and it was quite annoying having to explain the problem to everyone that I spoke too)Typical.
5. Documents/wiki are typically very hard to find anything that you can actually use. If I didn’t get a link to it from a tech support guy then I wouldn’t of known it was there.
6. Good telephone support is the #1 ultimate requirement.  Most cloud hosting scam companies will not have good telephone support.  They will chat online (through India) with you all day long but never give you a clear answer.  The will tell you to try this and try that but never how to solve your cloud hosting problem.  It’s the best way to sort the good guys from the bad. A bad cloud hosting company isn’t going to bother to answer the phone, – or will make you wait way too long, mainly for the face that they are likely getting endless complaints. The good guys are always ready to answer the phones, with a friendly voice.  They WANT to please the customer.
7. Multi-Year cloud hosting plans are a scam, no contract plans are the way to go (Only a dishonest host will try to force you into a contract for multiple years, where they can then ignore you for the rest of time.)  Make sure if you do sign a long cloud hosting contract that you have checked out other websites about them.  There are several cloud hosting scammers that would lock you into a 3 year contract and not give you any support.
8. Cloud hosting companies typically provides OK uptime, however most of their ticket services are terrible. If it takes them 3-4 hours to respond to normal tickets and 1-2 hours to respond to emergency tickets, you have a major problem. If it’s a real emergency, pick up the phone and call them. If it’s a real emergency the person you talk to should solve your problem right there on the spot and not leave you hanging.
9. Customer  Service is a huge issue.  Companies like Amazon EC2 charge big bucks for their support department.  You can spend $1000’s on useless support if you don’t know what you are doing.  Don’t be scammed into paying money for support on how to use their system.  If a cloud hosting company wants you bad enough, they will find a way to help support your site.  Plus, wouldn’t it help them to figure out the problem with their cloud site so they can help people in the future?  Just a thought.
10. Amazon EC2 doesn’t support Windows 2008. Can anyone say annoying?  Both because there are some features that I could have used and because Windows 2003 (their only Windows offering) is not supporting RDP saved passwords, and doesn’t support copy/paste in the login screen. Both of which make it horrible login experience with the crazy passwords Amazon assign.  Make sure you have the hardware you need on your cloud servers.
11. Once you have your site on the cloud you will still need to have IT people.  Yes, it is true.  Cloud computing is not the end of IT people.
12. When you are trying to send large amounts of data over FTP the connection kept being reset. This isn’t a normal use case but it made me wary of their connection.
13. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is one of cloud’s most recognized innovations, but strictly speaking it is a subset of the category because not all offerings are massively scalable. This means that, while some SaaS offerings are cloud, cloud is not SaaS.
14. Reliability is always a question.  When all the cloud hosting companies are different how can you make sure that they will all be reliable.  All cloud hosting companies differ in reliability and uptime.  Make sure you choose a reliable cloud hosting company from the beginning.
15. Spinning up a new instance in with many different cloud hosting providers seems to take about 15 – 30 minutes, which is annoyingly long.  Long instance provisioning time sucks. Yes, I know about reserved instances, not applicable for some scenarios.
16. I setup an instance, told it to install security updates, and rebooted it. It never came up. I am not sure what I am supposed to do in this case. You have to enter a support contract to recover this, as far as I could tell. It seems that the response would have been: ‘just recreate the instance’.   There seems to be no good way to recover an instance.  Amazon Ec2 should fix this.
17. All cloud hosting is secure… NOOOO, nothing is 100% secure. Take what happened to Gmail a couple months ago as a perfect example of what could happen on your cloud hosting server. Google’s apps are buggy, even Gmail has bugs in it, pretty obvious ones too.  Google Docs programs are full of problems, and this is supposed to be the future? All these programs are in the cloud.  Most cloud hosting companies are very secure, beware of the ones that are not.
18. Cloud computing is not the END solution to all your problems.  It will not end the IT department. Tom Austin, head of software research at analyst firm Gartner, believes that people in the 1990s “had a fundamental misunderstanding of how business, technology and economics work, and anyone saying that cloud is going to kill the IT department is engaging in the same logical errors”.  Make sure the cloud hosting company has the resources so that your system admin has the ability to do everything.
19. No two cloud hosting providers have the same system. Every cloud is different.  If you convert your website to the cloud and want to switch to another cloud hosting company. GOOD LUCK.  Chances are, they are 100% different.
20. Cloud Hosting is Easy… as long as you know what you are doing. HAHAHA

Now I don’t want you to think that I am against cloud hosting or don’t want you to use cloud hosting to your advantage.  I DO WANT YOU TO USE CLOUD HOSTING. I do however want you to know about all the problems with cloud hosting.  I want you to be aware that there are a lot of cloud hosting companies that are scamming people into believing that THEIR service is the “end all” solution to cloud hosting.  There are countless resources out there that can help you to understand the cloud. Use them to make the best decision while switching to the cloud.  Best of luck!

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(Cloud Hosting Scams Revealed)