Yes, but if it’s somebody else’s data center it’s on them to figure out how to earthquake proof or whatever. The cloud isnt just renting a computer, it’s renting a computer with a guarantee of uptime that somebody else can be financially liable for
If Jeff is using DataCenter XYZ, and then letting me use his API to manage my VMs on his "cloud", and I decide to rent a cage at the exact same DataCenter XYZ on my own servers, I'm now "self-hosting".
Same Datacenter. Same reliability infrastructure wise - power, earthquakes, tsunami, typhoons, black plague, monkey pox, etc.
You seem to equate the some straw man version of the cloud to simple rack hosting in a single location. They are nothing alike. A cloud service is almost always geographically diverse and highly available in a way that is beyond most people to build out.
Am I? Cloud providers usually quote price estimates for their least redundant single region services to give the impression of cost competitiveness.
But their virtual offerings are much less reliable than a standalone system by a lot (they guarantee to refund you the 25cents for your instance if it goes down, not the value of the service interruption or its cost. lol! Read that TOS)
What's the solution to their inherent unreliability? Redundancy at more cost.
Well, hey, you can rent two colocation facilities if you really need redundancy across geographic regions. And maybe you can just use your colo as a source for a CDN that is geographically diverse (for latency, not hurricanes).
Geographic diversity and HA is beyond most people? If you're the kind of business that needs that, you can hire the exact same people that Amazon Pip'd and fired because they didn't hit some arbitrary ticket metrics, to scale your business.
I mean seriously people, a "cloud" is just someone elses' data center.
Am I missing something?