First off, let me just say I actually kind of hate the phrase "in the cloud". Same goes for cloud-hosting and all the derivatives. What happened to online, in teh tubes, or the classic "ether"?

At any rate, that's not the point here. The point is the age old question, do you rely on the cloud? We all know the plusses and minuses so let's just cut to the chase: is not having to worry about hardware or maintaining a server really worth not having control over your own data?

Granted, I'm not the kind of person that normally askes this question. When most people ask whether to cloud or not to cloud they're thinking about documents (and whether to keep them online vs. on their own physical media) or perhaps a website (where the actual choice they're facing is cloud hosting vs. a remote server with virtual access). I'm in a different camp altogether: when my server has an issue I get in the car, go to the data center, and get hands on and arm deep into fixing it. And while that sounds like a lot of work (it can be!) it's also pretty darn gratifying. When it comes to work I like the fact that I have total control over my server; it annoys me to no end that I don't have control over the firewall as well.

So from that point of view, what are the perks of choosing the cloud? In the case of this blog, is the ease of setup worth the trade-off of control? I'm starting to think it's not. What are your thoughts?