Interesting read: What makes a quality Cloud hosting provider? Part 1

Over at Compare the Cloud a interesting read and, as always, a great discussion takes place. It's the post
What makes a quality Cloud hosting provider? Part 1 by Richard May.

Short break out:

"How is the supplier operating the platform? Do you have to compete with other users for resources? How does the platform deal with that contention? Different platforms handle this better than others and as many home broadband providers will notice, services can be slow during school holidays. Fine, but can you afford for your applications to be slow due to similar events occurring which are out of your control? I have heard of instances where providers are contending memory by 4 – 8 times on a server.
It is vital to make sure you get some performance guarantees from your supplier. 

Where is your supplier hosting the service, in a data centre or in their bedroom? I met a man a few weeks ago who was hosting a Lotus Notes solution in his cellar at home over 6 ADSL circuits and was complaining about the rain. If you cannot see the platform, find out where it is. Finding out what Tier classification the data centre is should also give you a guide to its suitability. I would suggest that Tier 3 or 4 should be a target, tier 4 being the best but still fairly uncommon in the UK."

My first comment who will be followed up by a new one today:

Richard, great post and I look forward to the next part. My comment: I agree you should check up on your CSP or reseller but I do think we have a problem if we have to check up on what hardware the service is running on. Of course it depends on what service you adopt and data you put in the service (= how business critical) but don't you think we need to put in more trust on the CSP? We should never be careless, we need to read the T&C (or says on the tin ;)), do the compliance, lock-in, security, compatibility, SLA etc check's, but if checking to deep nitty gritty it will take too much time etc. A reference is good but shouldn't be trusted as fact, though rumor might give you a hint. Couldn't that be somewhere enough? According to me; one part of what you need to let go when adopting cloud services is the detailed control of everything and put trust in you CSP and put more effort on information management. Sometimes you get what you pay for but I really do think that if you adopted a service produced in the bed room or in the cellar you haven't done your basic homework well enough.