Cloud vs Dedicated Server Pros and Cons
Rack of server room, by Taylor Vick on Unsplash |
Cloud is virtualized type of server, shared with many other tenants. Dedicated server or dedicated server is single tenant, the hosting provider giving you access to all the computer resources for you only.
Cloud pros
- No need to set up your own server, the cloud provider will give you ready to use infrastructure- No cost of building or maintaining the server
- Storage can be added as needed instantly, no need physical upgrade that can took time
- Managing the server can be initiated from anywhere, whatever device that have browser.
- Usually the cloud provider silently backing up your data, if somehow you do something wrong, you can request a backed up data from the provider
Cloud cons
- Data is not independent, your cloud's provider may have access of your data- Limit to data that can be stored in the cloud due to storage availability and cost.
- If the Internet goes down on your side or on your cloud provider’s side, you won’t have access to any of your information.
- If something unexpected happens to the provider's, you can't do nothing because you don't have physical control over your server
Dedicated server pros
- Physical full control over your data and computer resources.- Independent data, no third party has access to your data.
- For small to mid-sized companies, it can be the right choice regarding the cost.
Dedicated server cons
- Additional cost for our own hardware and infrastructure- Need a dedicated server IT support, to maintain and check directly to server location
- Need server admin that can manage OS level
- No guarantees of everything, maybe your server is slow, but it all depends on you the server administrator to optimize it
In my opinion, Google cloud platform is the best cloud service in the world. I like it very much, even though I am not using this service that long, less than 2 years. But i love it from the first time i register on it, and try several feature, like installing software from market place, doing some command line from web interface, etc.
Amazon AWS is also one of the popular cloud provider, but i never use it, so I can say that very much about, you can watch some YouTube video of people using AWS. For me, not very much interesting to try all the Cloud service provider. I would rather stick to cloud provider I already use, and it's already proven to be very helpful to solve my problem, to do it fast, easy and not make me mad about the service.
It's not that much big a deal to choose one of either Cloud service or dedicated server. Although Cloud has many advantages over dedicated server. I would recommend you to choose Cloud for your business infrastructure.
Choosing cloud means you can be more focus on building product that matter, rather than being busy with the problem of installing or setting up your infrastructure, because cloud is like a final infrastructure you can just use it and build some awesome stuff on top of it. Meanwhile dedicated server you need to do lot of stuff first before building your product. Also you need to keep maintaining that dedicated server you own, while the Cloud you don't need to maintain the underlying server settings or trouble, because cloud provider is the one that's responsible for that.
You can accomplished whatever you want in the IT world with whatever technology you decided to use, in the end it is just matter of consistency either you want to make a great fully functional business model, or you just created another ordinary product that people may not want to use it, because it is bad and buggy.