I'd like to say something in defense of the cloud -- its not just that its cool. Years ago I worked for a small web company which was ticking along and had capacity to spare on their servers.<p>One day, the skilled PR woman working there got an article about us appearing in a national newspaper. Traffic went up and the servers melted. The people visiting probably tried, saw the site was down and never thought about the company again. After a few years the company went under -- it just wasn't growing quickly enough.<p>I'm convinced that things would be different if cloud servers were available in those days. We could have brought some extra servers online for a couple of days to cope with the extra traffic without a large investment in rack space and servers that would only see occasional use.