In-house Servers vs Cloud
In-house Servers: are literally just that: Servers stored in your office. In the early 2000s, this might have been a single tower computer stored under someone’s desk with high speed connection and it would have housed your website and served as a central repository for proprietary information, like financial and customer data, or schematics, plans, and original research.
As your company grew, you might have a small computer room to store a blade server rack — thin components about five centimetres high — with several servers installed on a single rack.
Cloud Storage: are exactly like that, but you’re not responsible for the hardware at all. In fact, you’ll never see these servers. They’ll live elsewhere with the cloud servers provider, in a dedicated computer centre that no one is allowed to enter. They’re in massive buildings, in different parts of the world, and their locations are largely unknown. ( I dont find myself feeling to warm and fuzzy over my data somewhere elce!)
The main differences between in-house and cloud software are:
- In-house software is hosted locally, while cloud software is accessed through a web browser or other interface
- Cost: In-house servers are minim cost with the initial setup costs of just few hundred dollars, but cloud computing has higher costs due to rental data storage, Bandwidth costs, monthly software residuals and 24/7 Support.
- Scalability: Cloud computing offers instant scalability, while in-house software has limited scalability.
- Maintenance: In-house software requires maintenance, while cloud computing doesn’t.
- Cloud services providers already have these backups and fail safes in place.
- Control: In-house software provides complete control and customization