Infibase (via Data Center Knowledge) reports that of the top 500 thousand web sites, a mere three thousand are cloud hosted. That's less than 1%. In my book, one percent is a number barely above the noise threshold. We are hyping the cloud to death and the result is one percent. Big friggin deal. Wake me up when it's 10%.
In global PC shipments and browser statistics, where Apple ranks low enough to drop off the bottom end of the scale (less than 5%), it somehow manages to grab continuous (and nauseating) headlines. The hype certainly doesn't match the numbers in Apple’s case.
How much time do we spend chasing hype?
2 comments:
1. I'd expect owners of the top 500,000 web sites either to be able to run their own data centers or have solid and cost effective hosting in place.
2. There are far more interesting things to do in the cloud than web hosting. Parallelizable data processing, for instance, especially if the amount of computing power needed fluctuates.
3. I'd be more interested in web hosting with a cloud service if I were running a startup and couldn't predict my data center needs. Or if I had highly predictable cyclical needs with strong peaks and found it cheaper not to have unused hardware most of the year. No need to use the cloud exclusively.
4. Also of note in that article is the growth that EC2 experienced in a month. Part of where the hype comes from.
Not disagreeing that there's a lot of hype that isn't deserved.
I don't disagree that clouds are useful in some cases, especially the cases you've mentioned. I'm really commenting on the mismatch between hype and reality.
From a quick look at Alexa's top 1 million site list(domains, really), the 500K number probably includes most colleges, all major universities, most social and commercial domains that you've ever interacted with, and many city, state and county domains.
Of that set of data, apparently only 1% is in the cloud.
Of course the definition of 'top' 'site' and 'cloud' comes into play. The metrics that I can find don't break out any more than the domain name.
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