I'm really happy I don't host in the cloud. How quickly are the cost savings of cloud computing obliterated by PR, customer service, and system administration time when an outage like this occurs?
I think people not trusting the cloud is similar to how people feel safer driving their cars then taking a plane. The stats say the plane's safer, but people prefer being in control. People like the idea of being in control of their servers, even if that means there's hundreds of extra things that can go wrong compared to a cloud provider.
We also get a lot more publicity when a cloud provider has an outage as LOTS of sites go down at once. Hardly anyone notices when service X who self-host go down for a few hours...
Power failures.
Cross site links being cut due to engineering works.
Over heating due to air conditioning failures.
Flooding
You have to trust your cloud provider. They control everything you do. If their security isn't bulletproof, you're screwed. If their SAN's firmware isn't upgraded properly to deal with some performance issue, you're screwed. If their developers fuck up the API and you can't modify your instances, you're screwed. You have to put complete faith in a secret infrastructure run for hundreds of thousands of clients so there's no customer relationship to speak of.
That's just the "trust" issue. Then there's the issue of actual redundancy. It's completely possible to have a network-wide outage for a cloud provider. There will be no redundancy, because their entire system is built to be in unison; one change affects everything.
Running it yourself means you know how secure it is, how robust the procedures are, and you can build in real redundancy and real disaster recovery. Do people build themselves bulletproof services like this? Usually not. But if you cared to, you could.
The only real manual maintenance that we've got is a rolling reimaging of servers based on whatever's in version control, which usually takes a few hours twice a year, but we'd probably do that if we were in the cloud anyway.
When you can script away 90% of your system administration tasks, hosting in the cloud doesn't really make a ton of sense.
I'd take an hour long Appengine outage once a year over that anytime!
Any time you have an outage you need to contact your service provider to get an estimate of downtime. If they can't give you one, assume it'll take forever and cut the DNS over. The worst case is some of your users will start to come back online slowly. If you don't cut over, the worst case is all your users are down until whenever the service provider fixes it, and you get to tell your users "we're waiting for someone else to deal with it", which won't make them very happy.
12 hour stale data sounds kind of long to me. 4 hours sounds more reasonable.
How big is your ops team? I'm guessing it's more than 0.
We run about 11 client clusters across ~250 servers across 3 data centers in the US and Europe. Each of our client's uptime is very very close to 100%, and we've NEVER lost everything, even for 1 second.
I don't feel like i'm lacking control, i feel like somebody else is taking care of that really annoying shit that happens all the time, no matter how well you design your system.
Also a good hosting company will handle identifying/fixing/replacing bad hardware for you.
"The cloud is great because I can blame someone else" is obviously a tenuous argument.