@brentpresley, if you had read through the discussion in it's entirety you will notice that I was not comparing whether or not to choose a Dedicated over Cloud, I was discussing whether or not to choose Dedicated over VPS. The two products are completely different in a whole, and that is what this thread was intended to discuss in the first place.
Great, you handle enterprise customers, good on you :clap:
Your speaking as if Dedicated Servers were the worst solutions that the internet has had to offer, you also need to consider that a vast majority of websites, even enterprises, use dedicated infrastructure without any issues whatsoever and have been doing so for many years. Cloud Computing is still new in terms of the internet and has only really started to baloon over the past 3-4 years.
You jump to conclusions and panic about bad RAM, PSUs, Hard Drives... Sure, this happens all the time, woo hoo, it's going to happen in the cloud as well. I think it's great that your customers complain over as little as 5 seconds of downtime, unfortunately your customers have seen this 5 seconds of downtime.
When dealing with enterprise customers being sold on redundancy that they can deploy on their own using dedicated hardware with the proper configuration at a cost three to five times more than they would normally spend, and they can afford to do so, great let them run around in the "cloud".
It's very rare that you're going to come across faulty equipment, that is why you run proper diagnostics and keep track of things. In the last 10 years I have had to deal with 5 bad sticks of ram, 2 harddrives with crashed heads, 38 corrupt SSD Drives and one motherboard with a blown capacitor. This happens, but not often at all. Even still, notice a pattern?
In the end, cool, the Cloud is great, but just because it's great for multi-million dollar clients, doesn't mean that it is for everybody else.
As I said previously, through my experience I have seen less reliability in the cloud than I have with any other system availible.
