Fantastic Idea but often crap end product
Cloud computing offers the ideal. Theoretical 100% uptime, immediate failover, snapshot backups blah blah blah.
What we have ended up with (with 3 different vendors now) is slow, unreliable machines with massive disk queue times, never reboot properly and cumbersome billing and management. Beyond more trouble than they are worth.
Back to Dedicated hosting now and getting some sleep at night too :D
Biting the hand that feeds IT
