Fear & loathing in the datacenter
We used to run an email hosting service. It was easy money: set up the server, manage the mailboxes, configure the backups and charge the customer every year like clockwork. Lock-in was really tight (nobody wants to move a critical service, least of one that involves configuration information on each computer in the company). Sounds pretty great right? It was. Except it used to go down a lot because redundany is difficult. And spam was an enormous problem. And the web portal was terrible. And we were constantly assaulted by viruses in attachments. And ever-increasing storage requirements were an issue. And… you get the drift.
In 2006 Google started allowing custom domains with Gmail. We were excited, having grown accustomed to using GMail for our personal mail, the idea of using it for our business seemed like a great idea. I remember very clearly setting up the MX records for our domain the very first time, just reading the DNS entries told us how much better Gmail would be than our own email. 5 separate failover servers? There wasn’t a service on offer that could match that level of reliability. After testing it for 2 months we came to the conclusion that Gmail was better in every conceivable way to our own email service.
Despite having a growing revenue stream related to hosted email we recommended Gmail to all our customers and offered them free migration. We did this because Google was able to do email at a scale and with a level of proficiency that we would never be able to match. It was the right move for our customers.
In our opinion, a lot of the debate around on-premises/datacenter servers and the cloud boils down to this: The major cloud vendors have better datacenters, better engineers, better deals with hardware vendors, better licensing terms, better redundancy, better connectivity and better security than you could ever have building your own.
This belief is ultimately the reason CloudCover exists. We believe every company in the world is better served by dismantling it’s on-premises setups and moving to the cloud sooner than later. It leads to efficiencies of scale and cost. It affords agility and speed that cannot be matched. It is better in every conceivable way. It is the right move for you. And it is the future.
