... I want my data and apps close to me. Backups far away, live stuff close. The reasoning is simple. We all know to keep our friends close, and our enemies closer. Computers, software and data are my enemy.

Still, companies going bankrupt because they lose access to their data and apps will just weed out the weak and the stupid. So perhaps I should thank the "cloud" merchants for that at least.

Hmm what are the odds of going through the worst case scenario two times in two months?

A full restart, hundreds of servers, one sever at a time. They are kidding right?

With portable computers having the capability that desktops only dreamed of 10 years ago, WHY would anyone use "cloud computing"?

P.T. Barnum was right (Y,y,y, I know, it was really David Hannum who said it ... but who has ever heard of him?).

I've had to present this very scenario to many clients wanting to jump on the cloud computing bandwagon. I'm sorry but having most if not all of a mission critical environment "in the cloud" is at this time a woefully bad idea. Might it improve in the future? Possibly, but I can't see myself ever having that level of confiedence in the system regardless of who is behind it. Even with the big players (Google, Amazon, IBM, etc). Though I admit that it's a good test bed and I've recommended it as such to several who don't necessarily need or want to invest in a full time test environment.

In the end though I'm one of those as well that want the OS/apps close to me and the backups safely stowed but still available to me if need be.

I'm not the only one that thinks farming out your critical systems to a 3rd party company is a Bad Idea. OK if you are running a smallish website, but you don't know what the failover is (if there is any, as cloud is supposed to be failsafe yes?), you don't know their backup system, and you don't know actually how skilled the guys are the other end are.

Well, to give some balance, have had Tony from Flexiscale on the phone giving me an open and honest explanation of what happened and why. Doesn't change the end result, and he doesn't deny that it wasn't wrong, they got burnt again, before they've had a the opportunity to apply the fixes they need. But applaud Tony for his honesty after the fact

Where I live, clouds come and go all the time. I prefer it when there are no clouds, its nicer.

As for clouds with computers, we all know mixing water and the electricity used by computers will eventually lead to disasters. Anyone using a computer in a cloud should expect the odd spark or two.