If you noticed the internet wobbling recently, you weren’t alone. When AWS had an outage, websites, apps, and even major platforms went dark for hours. It’s a painful reminder that even the giants aren’t invincible.
And as hosting veteran Sebastien Lahtinen summed it up perfectly: “Cloud is this magical thing people think means they don’t have to worry about infrastructure, but all cloud is, is someone else’s computer. And when it goes wrong, you have even less influence over how it’s managed.”
Let’s unpack that a bit, because it’s an important reality check for businesses who rely entirely on “the cloud.”
The Cloud Isn’t a Superpower
Cloud sounds easy. Spin up a server, scale as you grow, no hardware headaches. But when you move everything to a hyperscaler like AWS or Azure, you’re handing over control. If they go down, you go down. If they decide to run maintenance, it’s on their schedule, not yours. And if something breaks, your business is one tiny ticket in a sea of thousands. The only benefit is you can say “but Reddit is down too”
Sebastien put it bluntly: “When a hyperscaler does maintenance, it’s their choice. When you do maintenance on your own server, you choose the time that works for your business.” That’s not just a tech issue; it’s a business risk.
Cloud Isn’t Cheaper (No, Really!)
One of the reasons many businesses go into the cloud is because they believe it’s cheaper, with cost tied to scale as they grow. Whilst there’s certainly elements of cloud ecosystems which can be cheaper to start with, many customers will find they end up with unexpected data transfer bills to pull data from cloud services, or end up reliant on specific cloud services from their provider, and then find it difficult to move off those without considerable work. When you grow infrastructure, it can be much more expensive.
Dedicated Servers Give You the Steering Wheel Back
Dedicated infrastructure means your website or application lives on your own server, with exclusive resources, guaranteed CPU, memory, and storage. No sharing. No noisy neighbours. No waiting for someone else’s fix.
And while cloud and VPS options are great for testing or staging infrastructure, start-up projects, or scaling up your demand during peaks, having your core operations on dedicated infrastructure gives you a lot more control, whilst still utilising the benefits of the cloud where it’s needed. This is what many refer to as ‘hybrid cloud’
If your business relies on uptime, think e-commerce, finance, or enterprise apps – dedicated servers give you that peace of mind. You decide when to update, maintain, and grow.
By having a base level of critical infrastructure dedicated, using cloud where you have specific needs, you can avoid a lot of the problems with cloud services, and take advantage of it where needed.
Why Local Hosting Really Counts
There’s another angle to this conversation: location.
When your data lives overseas, it travels thousands of kilometres every time a customer visits your site. That means slower load times, higher latency, and less control over what happens in between. This comes down to the laws of physics and the speed of light. If you’re going to host your South African website in the cloud, at least pick an African region, not one based in the U.S. Picking the cheapest zone to host may have much bigger consequences for user experience, and down the line, the sales you do online.
Hosting locally, here in South Africa, keeps your data close to your users. It’s faster, safer, and helps your business stay compliant with POPIA data regulations. Plus, it supports South African tech jobs. Something we all benefit from.
Cloud Can Still Be Great. If It’s Built Right.
To be clear, the cloud isn’t the enemy. It just needs to be engineered properly. As Sebastien says: “You need to make sure it’s designed for failures. That often requires extensive setup, management, and coding, not just spinning up a server. You need infrastructure replicated across multiple Availability Zones, ensuring your databases remain in sync and have appropriate failover. This is why some of the largest companies failed when AWS’s US-EAST-1 region went down.
You probably should also be writing applications to work on multiple cloud platforms to avoid reliance on a single one.
So yes, use the cloud where it adds value. Just don’t assume it’s the better option by default. A hybrid setup that combines the stability of dedicated servers with the flexibility of cloud resources is often the smartest and most resilient choice.
The Takeaway
When the cloud stumbles, it’s easy to feel helpless. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Owning or anchoring your infrastructure locally gives your business stability, speed, and control, the things the cloud can’t always guarantee. At 1-grid, we help South African businesses strike that balance. Whether you need a dedicated server, a hybrid setup, or a custom-built solution tailored to your performance and security needs, we’re here to make sure your website stays where it belongs – online.
Because in hosting, reliability isn’t somewhere in the cloud, it’s built right here at home.