[admin (no pm's please)]

This follows on from the previous entry. Just read this report:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/15/mckinsey_cloud_report/

Which includes the claim that the Amazon cloud can actually more than double costs  

It raises the issue as well of being locked in, and subject to price hikes. Whereas with our own servers we can at least to some degree physically move them elsewhere if absolutely necessary.

The report does say nice things about virtualisation on your own servers, which as I have said before is the path I find most attractive.

In particular it would allow for more proactive server monitoring, already there is a lot of this going on but some of the ultimate actions are done manually as an entire server is too a big apple cart to let monitoring software make severe decisions on.

With virtualisation a server might be running 20 virtual forums servers and one server intelligently monitoring. Not only would those 20 servers be operation more efficiently, but it would be easier to rely on actions taken by automatic software in an environment set up with virtualisation in mind and where only 5% of forums would be effected by such an action.