[Bluespider]

O.k. as a starter for 10 on this one then.

Wha cloud based services are you currently using?

Personal:
File storage and sharing (Drop Box)
Backup (Carbonite)

Clients:
File Storage (Drop Box, Microsoft Cloud services)
Backup (Carbonite)
VOIP PBX (BT etc)
Google Docs

What is everyone else using and what are your experiences, worries or issues with using cloud based services?

[Josefov]

I've been using the Live Mesh Beta for a long time and I absolutely loved it. Unfortunately, since it became the new Windows Live Mesh, I'm not convinced. Maybe just got used too much to the old interface. I'm still using it though for what it does. I have my little folder with essential software and tools synced between three computers and I love the fact that when a new version of, say CCleaner, is out I only need to update it on one machine.

Got the Live account with the SkyDrive that came with it but as soon as I realised you can't download folders with content in I forgot all about it.

I also have a couple of Picasa web albums which are very useful for showing all sorts of pictures to family and friends living in all sorts of other countries.

So in all it's just a bunch of consumer services that sometimes make life a little bit easier but are not absolutely essential. I've tried once Google Docs for a sort of creative project that required collaboration from three people living quite apart and it was rubbish. Wave, on the other hand, was just brilliant and I still can't believe that Google doesn't mind pumping money into some stupid Buzz no one wants instead of giving Wave another chance (and a little bit of marketing, maybe).

Business wise, at work, we're still oldskool. Can't beat a stack of beefy servers you can walk up to and kick, I says

[helena]

I have a small rails application on heroku. It's more expensive than using a slice but really easy to deploy and zero installation. The other problem is recent Amazon EC2 outage meant my site, like reddit and countless startups, was down for a couple of days. Still though reliability is very good and this outage must have caused severe embarrassment so not likely to happen again soon hopefully.

[Assassin8or]

At home I'm using the live sync of Mesh for 5GB of data storage.

At work, we have a 50GB dropbox account, plus, four AWS instances and two Rackspace cloud instances. We'll be steadily moving away from our five dedicated managed servers in the future, but we'll be expanding our capabilities at the same time.

[Techquarters]

Just gone over Office 365, so far so good works very well, Migration easy,,

[Kaly96]

In my experience, there's nothing "magic" about cloud technology. It's more about ease of scaling, fault-tolerance, and cost savings than the ability to add new features. Feature-wise, you can generally do the same thing with dedicated server farms. Of course, nothing wrong with Blizzard making their services faster, cheaper, and more reliable.

It would definitely be nice to see built-in replay sharing though, as others have said, and it would also be nice to be able to stream directly to Ustream and Justin.tv without having to use 3rd party screen capture tools. Of course, it would also require the ability to manage overlays and things like that, but with full control of the user interface, Blizzard would be able to integrate overlays in probably a nicer looking manner.

It would also be really awesome to have the shared Blizzard instant messenger features on my iPhone though. Blizzard, if you guys don't want to go to all the trouble of making the mobile apps, just make a nice little API for it and I'll handle the rest

[bronven]

Just moved over to Office 365, so far so good. Had a small problem getting one domain name validated, but the other one went through first time no problem.

I have to say the way I'm running it works well, I have Office 2010 Pro Plus on desktop & laptop, as well as Sharepoint Workspace on both. This means all my important docs are located on the cloud as well as both machines, so if the cloud fails.... I still have access to all my docs. It all synchronises perfectly & I can even access the Sharepoint stuff using an iPhone app. Plus all my emails, calendar & contacts are synchronised on all devices.

I had a server running SBS 2008 for Exchange & document sharing, but when I sat down & worked out the relative costs, I'm saving over a £100 a year on electricity costs alone!

I've no doubt some issues will arise in the future, but if MS keep the costs similar to what they are & don't muck things up I think they're onto a winner.